U.S. Allies Jostle to Win Exemptions From Trump Tariffs

U.S. Allies Jostle to Win Exemptions From Trump Tariffs
Cecilia Malmstrom, the European commissioner for trade, said during a news conference in Brussels on Wednesday
that any fight back against the United States would be “by the book.”
But even as European Union leaders prepared for retaliatory action, they also recalled the long history of trans-Atlantic bonhomie.
“How India or any other country could be a threat to the U. S. within the steel industry, I don’t know,” said Shivramkrishnan
Hariharan, the commercial director of Essar Steel, a large steel manufacturer based in Mumbai.
The tariffs “have nothing to do with the security of the United States,” Georg Streiter,
a spokesman for German Chancellor Angela Merkel, said at a news briefing Friday.
“Working very quickly on a security agreement so we don’t have to impose steel
or aluminum tariffs on our ally, the great nation of Australia,” he said.
A country that offers something in return for an exemption could set a precedent, allowing the White House to make further demands in the future in return for access to the United States market,
and fracture any sense of unity between capitals from Brussels to Seoul that have roundly criticized the tariffs.
“The difficulty is that a huge portion of U. S. steel imports come from core allies like Nafta, Japan, Australia,
and Brazil,” said Seth Rosenfeld, an analyst at Jefferies, an investment bank, in London.