Donald Trump’s man in Brussels has a simple message for Europe: Let’s be friends — and fight China.
Describing China’s influence as “malign,” Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, told POLITICO that his country and the EU should overcome their current trade tensions and join forces against the Chinese.
“We should … combine our mutual energies — we have a $40 trillion combined GDP, there is nothing on the planet that is more powerful than that — to meet China and check China in multiple respects: economically, from an intelligence standpoint, militarily,” he said in an interview.
“That’s where the EU and U.S. really should be linking arms,” Sondland continued, advocating for “a quick resolution that would move our trade relationship in the right direction so that we can both turn toward China, which is really the future problem in multiple respects.”
However, the odds are stacked against a quick fix, with Washington demanding difficult concessions from Europe while Brussels blames the Trump administration for the trade tensions and accuses the U.S. of trying to blackmail Europe with tariff threats.
U.S. President Donald Trump and European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker reached a truce in July and last month both sides presented negotiating objectivesfor a planned EU-U.S. trade deal. Progress has stalled, however, as the EU rejects demands to discuss greater market access for U.S. agricultural goods and the Americans have been reluctant to accept a European push for reductions in auto duties.
Sondland’s comments come a few days ahead of a February 19 deadline for U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to present the outcome of his trade investigation under a Cold War-era national security law, which many EU officials fear will recommend the White House slap hefty tariffs on European cars and car parts. The Commission has said it would react by immediately withdrawing its offer of trade talks and retaliating with tariffs on about €20 billion worth of American exports.
The ambassador said the U.S. is eager to avoid escalation but added that its “patience is not unlimited.” Faced with what he described as “enormous” trade imbalances in Europe’s favor, he said these must start being corrected “or the United States will simply be forced to do a tit-for-tat.”
Agriculture and farmers
America’s prime frustration with the EU is its adamant refusal to include agriculture in trade talks, saying this is not part of the joint statement from July. The ambassador’s explanation for that omission was that the word “agriculture” was swapped for “farmers” at the last moment — at Juncker’s request.
“The president made it very clear that no deal would get through Congress without agriculture … in fact, the declaration that was drafted definitely included the word ‘agriculture’ as one of the things that we would be working on,” Sondland said.
“A very interesting thing occurred,” he went on. “All of a sudden” the Commission chief asked Trump if the word “agriculture” in the text could be changed to “farmers” to avoid upsetting some EU countries. “And President Trump said: ‘Sure, Jean-Claude, I’m happy to accommodate that, we all know what it means,’ took out his pen and changed the word ‘agriculture’ to ‘farmers.'”
“The narrative ever since then has been the Europeans adamantly denied that agriculture was ever on the table, when in fact I stood two feet from both presidents when that agreement was made,” Sondland said.
The Commission confirmed Juncker’s intervention, but had a different take on it: “Yes, we confirm that the word ‘agriculture’ was indeed deleted from the text,” said a senior Commission official who traveled with Juncker to the White House in July. “We all know what this means.”
EU trade chief Cecilia Malmström gave her own explanation last month for Europe’s exclusion of agriculture from the trade talks. “We’re not going to discuss agriculture as the U.S. side they will not discuss the Jones Act (a U.S. shipping regulation), ‘Buy America’ public procurement, geographical indications, and things that are usually there,” she said.
Targeting China
If Sondland’s push for an alliance against Beijing sounds familiar to Europeans, it’s because the EU made the same pitch to Washington last year: When French President Emmanuel Macron visited the White House last spring, he proposed joint action against market-distorting Chinese trade practices such as heavy subsidies, forced technology transfer and state-owned enterprises. However, Trump rejected Macron’s offer at the time, according to EU diplomats.
The European Commission also sent a confidential letter to Washington in March 2018, setting out why Brussels is Washington’s ally in the fight against unfair trade practices from China and should therefore be spared Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs, which he nevertheless imposed in June.
The U.S. ambassador linked his criticism of Beijing’s practices to the case of Chinese telecoms giant Huawei, which is the main target of a current U.S. campaign advising Europeans not to contract Chinese companies when building their 5G networks.
“We want to keep critical infrastructure in the Western world out of Chinese malign influence,” Sondland said. “Someone from the Politburo in Beijing picks up the phone and says ‘I wanna listen in on the following conversation, I wanna run a certain car off the road that’s on the 5G network and kill the person that’s in it,’ there’s nothing that company legally can do today in China to prevent the Chinese government from making that request successfully.”
A Huawei spokesperson rejected such accusations, insisting that the company “has a clean track record on cybersecurity” and is “committed to work with European institutions to develop a cybersecurity standard for Europe.”