By BLOOMBERG

BRUSSELS • The European Union (EU) mounted a last-ditch push to stop US President Donald Trump from triggering tariffs on foreign steel and aluminium, vowing a “firm” response and warning of widespread damage from a trans-Atlantic trade war.

“I truly hope that this will not happen,” EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom told reporters yesterday in Brussels. “A trade war has no winners”.

The EU intends to hit a range of US goods with punitive tariffs in retaliation for Trump’s pledges to impose a 25% duty on foreign steel and a 10% levy on imported aluminium. His plan is based on a national-security argument that Malmstrom called “alarming” and “deeply unjust”.

In response to the White House’s steel measure, the EU is targeting €2.8 billion (RM13.65 billion) of imports of US goods including Harley-Davidson Inc motorcycles, Levi Strauss & Co jeans and bourbon whiskey. In addition to such iconic brands, the American products that would face a tit-fortat EU tariff of 25% range from steel bars and motor boats to t-shirts and orange juice.

The EU has grown increasingly exasperated with Trump’s “America First” agenda, viewing it as a threat to the multilateral trade order that the US played a leading role in building after the Second World War.

Trump has already frozen years of talks on a trans-Atlantic market opening agreement, pulled out of a trans-Pacific trade accord and demanded changes to a 24-year-old commercial pact among the US, Canada and Mexico. That has left European policymakers unabashedly defending the liberal economic order that the EU stands for and pushing for free-trade deals from the Pacific rim to Latin America.

Political voices across Europe have echoed critics in the US urging Trump to drop his metal-tariffs plan, saying it would cause more economic harm than good and fail to address the root problem of overcapacity in China.

“Trade promotes prosperity if it’s based on exchange, on working together,” Brigitte Zypries, Germany’s outgoing economy minister, said in a statement. “The current signals from the US fill me with concern.”

The steel industry has political importance of its own to the EU, which was born out of the European Coal and Steel Community in the 1950s. The European industry also continues to have economic clout, generating annual sales of around €170 billion, accounting for more than 1% of EU gross domestic product and directly providing over 300,000 jobs.

Trump’s metal-tariffs plan would affect EU steel exports valued at €5.3 billion and aluminium exports worth €1.1 billion last year.

“It will put thousands of European jobs in jeopardy and it has to be met by a firm and proport ionate response,” Malmstrom said. “This would be damaging to trans-Atlantic relations but potentially also to a global rules-based trading system.”

Beyond imposing retaliatory tariffs on US goods, the EU is weighing filing a World Trade Organisation (WTO) case against the Trump administration in cooperation with other countries and introducing “safeguard” measures to prevent steel shipments from other parts of the world to America from being diverted to the European market and flooding it.

Malmstrom expressed confidence that Europe would win any WTO verdict.

She said the EU would have a “very strong” legal argument against American metal tariffs based on national-security considerations because Europe is a defence ally of the US and European steel exports to the country are overwhelmingly for non-military uses.