EU Ambassador Disagrees With Summit Observers Who Say Nothing Was Solved in Trade
The moderator of a panel on the results of the president's visit to Europe asked the European Union's ambassador to the U.S., Stavros Lambrinidis, what he would say to critics who say that nothing was solved on the EU-U.S. irritants? Those critics say that the can was just kicked down the road.
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Lambrinidis, speaking June 23 in front of a virtual Washington International Trade Association audience, said that more was accomplished than just a long-term truce on Airbus-Boeing tariffs. He said there were principles set on the kinds of government support that Americans had traditionally offered Boeing and that European countries had traditionally offered Airbus.
"We have the principles in place, we are going to use the next five years to ensure we actually apply them now in practice," he said. "We didn’t kick anything down the road."
He said the problem of Section 232 tariffs on Europe and its countermeasures are more complex. He said that steel is a very sensitive sector in the U.S., and that Chinese overcapacity creates "a real issue for our industries." So, he said, there are political considerations in finding a solution. But he said that the two sides have a self-imposed deadline of five and a half months. "That's plenty of time to resolve this," he said.
Those weren't the only advances in trade, he said. He noted the recent sanctions against officials in Belarus, which were simultaneously imposed by the United Kingdom, Canada, the EU and the U.S. He said that the EU has argued for years that sanctions are stronger when they're multilateral, because then "those hit by the sanctions cannot divide and conquer us."
British Ambassador Karen Pierce told the audience that while the joint statements coming out of the G-7 and bilateral meetings between Prime Minister Boris Johnson and President Joe Biden did not talk much about China, the countries did talk about the challenges China poses. Belt and Road and what's happened with 5G equipment "has opened countries’ eyes a bit on the risk we might fall behind," she said.
She said that the fact that no Western firms make 5G network equipment "was fundamentally a market failure." She said that the G-7 countries want to work out what the right level of government intervention is when evaluating resilient supply chains, both in terms of security and the issue of shortages in times of emergency. "There are some aspects of the new technologies that can’t be left to the markets," she said.