EU Trade Official Says Much Work Needed to Calm US-EU Trade Tensions
European Union Director General for Trade Sabine Weyand said the EU has made another offer to settle the Boeing-Airbus dispute. “There's a lot we need to do to calm down the tensions in our relationship,” she said during a Sept. 15 webinar hosted by the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at Johns Hopkins University. She pointed to the deal on lobster tariffs as good but small. “It's the first tariff liberalization we have done in 20 years” between the U.S. and EU, she noted.
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Weyand said the World Trade Organization's rules do “not reflect today's realities, notably, the rise of China as a major player.” She said the WTO needs to deal with the effects of China's state-backed capitalism on the rest of the world. The Trump administration's China trade war is trying to take on forced technology transfer, while the EU has been grappling with that issue as it negotiates with China on an investment treaty, she said: They would have done better to compare notes and act in unison. “The costs of the trade war with China have been borne by us, businesses and U.S. consumers, and China has not been reined in,” she said.
Also, Weyand said WTO negotiations need to progress on digital trade, as well as on environmental goods and services.
She said the EU wants to work with the U.S. on revising the dispute settlement system. “We are in crisis because of the paralysis of the Appellate Body,” she said, adding that the EU agrees with the U.S. that it takes far too long to get final settlement of disputes.
In an indirect criticism of U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer's idea that dispute resolution should resemble corporate mediation, Weyand said firmly, “We want to go back to 1995, we do not want to go back to 1947.” The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which began in 1947, did not have binding dispute resolution.
Panelist Kellie Meiman Hock, a managing partner at McLarty Associates, and Weyand agreed that the Obama administration-era Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership talks should not be revived.
Weyand asked: What would a bilateral free trade agreement “between the EU and the U.S. do to deal, for instance, with the challenge posed by China?”
She said TTIP failed because of very important differences between Europe and the U.S. But she welcomed the notion of the U.S. and the EU trying to get on the same page on tackling climate change, so that U.S. goods aren't subject to a carbon border adjustment tax. “We welcome partners around the world to see whether together we can advance our environmental ambition,” she said.