European Union officials are voicing optimism about a possible trade deal with the United States, aiming for 15 percent across-the-board tariffs, including on cars and car parts, but they have also made clear that they are preparing to strike back should an agreement fall through.
On Thursday, nearly every European Union country voted to back a plan to retaliate against President Trump’s tariffs, setting the stage to hit more than 93 billion euros’ worth of U.S. imports with levies should he follow through on his threat to tax European imports at 30 percent. Hungary was the lone holdout.
The measures, which will be adopted later Thursday by the European Commission, the E.U.’s executive arm, would kick in on Aug. 7 unless a satisfactory accord is reached, Olof Gill, a commission spokesman, said at a briefing in Brussels.
But whether they will actually be deployed remains to be seen. For one thing, the prospect of retaliation has made the European corporate world uncomfortable. Many company executives fear that any retaliation could infuriate Mr. Trump and expose them to even higher U.S. tariffs. The luxury, cosmetics and food industries in particular have been lobbying in Brussels against enacting any countermeasures.
Mr. Gill declined to say whether the European Union would still strike back if the United States imposed a lower 15 percent tariff on European imports, similar to the terms of the deal the United States made with Japan. “Right now, our focus is on finding a negotiated outcome with the U.S.,” he said, adding that one is “within reach.”
European trade officials have been negotiating furiously with their American counterparts to avoid escalating a trade war after Mr. Trump’s threat of a 30 percent tariff blindsided the Europeans, who had been expecting a 10 percent duty.
European exports to the United States reached €532 billion last year. A 10 percent tax on sales of those goods would reduce European growth by around 0.3 percent in the first year, but a 30 percent tax would create a bigger bang, according to an analysis by Oxford Economics.
Negotiators in Brussels have been keeping the threat of retaliation on the back burner. But Mr. Trump’s on-again, off-again tariff threats galvanized politicians, including President Emmanuel Macron of France, who said the European Union had no choice but to present a show of force.
The U.S. Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said Wednesday that Washington was making progress on the negotiations. More talks between the bloc’s top trade negotiator and its American counterpart are planned this week.
Even so, at a meeting in Berlin on Wednesday night, Mr. Macron and Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said they were ready to “take additional measures” if the negotiations were not satisfactory.
The European Union’s retaliation package combines two separate tariff lists. The first would place higher duties on €21 billion worth of American goods in response to Mr. Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs. The second widened the list of targeted U.S. products to include Boeing airplanes and Kentucky bourbon.
The idea is to deploy the combined package if the Trump administration allows 30 percent tariffs against the bloc to start in August. Mr. Merz warned recently that tariffs that high “would hit the German export industry to the core.”
It is less clear how much backing there will be to deploy a counterattack if the two sides negotiate a 15 percent tariff. One European official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the trade talks are private, said that retaliation would depend on the final shape of any deal.
In the meantime, some European companies are pleading for restraint, especially those in industries that symbolize European or American know-how. Earlier this year, for example, when Europe threatened to tax Kentucky bourbon at a higher rate in retaliation to Mr. Trump’s initial threat of a 20 percent tariff on imported E.U. goods, the president hit back with a threat to tax Champagne at 200 percent.
“We want negotiations — companies want to keep the market unblocked instead of pursuing a hard line,” Marc-Antoine Jamet, the secretary-general of the LVMH Moët Hennessy-Louis Vuitton group, said at a business conference in Paris last week. Should Europe target American goods anew, “we will become collateral victims, symbols of a combat that is not ours.”
Germany’s leading automakers, especially BMW and Mercedes, which produce vehicles in the United States for export back to Europe, have lobbied against retaliatory measures, fearing that they would be doubly penalized.
Even the European beauty industry is wringing its hands. The United States is the world’s leading buyer of European cosmetics. American consumers purchase €2.8 billion worth of French creams and perfumes alone, according to the French Federation of Beauty Enterprises. Should negotiators in Brussels target American cosmetics imports, the fear is that tariffs on Made-in-Europe fragrances and skin care will zoom higher.
“We don’t want to be targeted,” said Emmanuel Guichard, the director general of the federation.
Their main concern is getting squeezed between big industrial players like Airbus and Boeing, and European automakers that are much bigger quarry for U.S. tariffs. In May, the Airbus chief executive, Guillaume Faury, said that if negotiations between Europe and the United States did not result in the cancellation of tariffs on aerospace, Europe should enact retaliatory measures against U.S. aircraft manufacturers.
Jeanna Smialek contributed reporting from Brussels and Melissa Eddy from Berlin.