FAFO Watch: Trump Threatens Europe With 200% Wine and Spirit Tariffs

Consequences loom for trying to resist President Donald Trump’s bid to rebalance the Untied States’ economic relationship with the rest of the world to a more rational footing, he signalled on Thursday, threatening a mega 200 per cent tariff on European alcohol.

Moves to reverse decades of deindustrialisation and a shift to a European-style import economy for the United States has angered the European Union, which has long imposed tariffs and non-tariff barriers on American products while exporting a great deal westward. The EU had responded to President Trump’s 25 per cent steel tariffs this week with targeted tariffs on American products made in Republican-voting states in an attempt at punishment diplomacy.

In the crosshairs of the European Union were Harley-Davidson motorcycles, meat produced in Kansas, lumber from Alabama, and even American bourbon whiskey.

President Trump called the EU’s 50-per-centy left on whiskey “nasty” and returned the favour on Thursday, stating he would impose a 200 per cent tariff on European wines, champagne and “alcoholic products coming out of France and other EU represented countries”.

He said: “The European Union, one of the most hostile and abusive taxing and tariffing authorities in the World…  If this Tariff is not removed immediately, the U.S. will shortly place a 200% Tariff… This will be great for the Wine and Champagne businesses in the U.S.”

The countries which export most wine and spirits to the U.S. are France, Italy, and Spain.

The legacy media has generally attempted to hit back at Trump on his use of tariffs, leaning on a economic orthodoxy decided a century ago that tariffs are bad. Economics is not a hard science, of course, but a social science and the empirical truth of what makes the best possible economy is still a work in progress.

Britain’s Guardian typified the appeal to authority approach, asserting merely that tariffs repatriating jobs to America is a “theory that is roundly rejected by most mainstream economists”.

Indeed, President Trump himself has hit back at such criticism, calling the “Globalist Wall Street Journal” as institutionally captured by the “polluted thinking of the European Union”. Paraphrasing the 32nd President, Trump wrote: The only thing you have to fear, is fear itself!”.

Other countries, perhaps looking on in horror at the European Union and Canada’s attempts to best Trump on trade, have decided to take a more understated approach to tariffs. As reported the United Kingdom and Australia have both criticised the policy, but nevertheless said they won’t be drawn into retaliation while hoping to negotiate exemptions and carve outs for their own economies.