The European Union said on Monday it would make a strong case for tariff cuts with the United States this week, while also readying countermeasures should a deal be unreachable.
A spokesperson for the 27-nation bloc’s executive branch, the European Commission, which oversees trade policy, said it was prioritizing negotiations, days after U.S. President Donald Trump said he would double import duties on steel and aluminum from 25 percent to 50 percent.
“We don’t want to go down the route of tariffs. Rather than having them increase, we want to decrease or even where possible, eliminate them,” the commission’s trade spokesperson, Olof Gill, told a press conference in Brussels….