BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union’s detente on tariffs with the United States has not put to rest “profound disagreements” on trade policy, the European commissioner in charge of trade said on Thursday.
In Washington, U.S. President Donald Trump rejected an EU offer to eliminate tariffs on cars and said the EU’s trade policies are “almost as bad as China,” Bloomberg News reported.
Trump agreed in July to refrain from imposing car tariffs while the two sides sought to cut other trade barriers, in a move described then by the European Commission chief as a major concession.
Speaking to the trade committee of the European Parliament on Thursday, European Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom discussed a group that she and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer will lead to determine how tariffs might be removed on industrial goods.
“We are not negotiating anything, we have a working group. We have profound disagreements with the United States on trade policy,” Malmstrom said.
A number of the European lawmakers were fierce critics of a planned EU-U.S. Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), negotiations which ended after Trump’s election victory in 2016.
“We are not restarting TTIP ... This could be a more limited trade agreement, focused on tariffs on goods only,” Malmstrom said.
She also said the European Union would be willing to reduce its car tariffs to zero, if the United States did the same, going beyond the provisional agreement struck in July which referred only to “non-auto industrial goods”.
“We would do it if they do it. That remains to be seen,” she said, adding she hoped a deal could be finalised by the end of the Commission’s five-year term running until Oct. 31, 2019.
Trump, in an interview with Bloomberg, said of
