If there’s one thing that US President Donald Trump’s tariff vandalism has done, it’s to stress test trading partners’ ability to make and execute trade policy at speed. The latest put under this pressure is the EU, which reacted with startled affront last weekend when Trump suddenly threatened its exports with a 30 per cent tariff.
This last week has shown us one situation where the EU’s trade policy machine has worked with persistence and precision. It has also revealed a rather more important one in which it is flailing, the flaws in its institutional structure being matched by a failure of imagination about how to overcome them.
First, the modest good news. After almost exactly 10 years of negotiation, Brussels obtained a “political agreement” with Indonesia for a bilateral trade deal. This will further widen its footprint in east Asia. Such announcements can cover up a lot of continued gaps in negotiating positions with warm-words aspiration, but a political agreement creates a degree of expectation which generally leads to the real thing.