Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has said the European Commission was “not wise” to impose retaliatory tariffs of up to 50 per cent on US goods from April 1 and instead needed to avoid a trade war that would “not benefit the US or Europe”.
“We must continue to work concretely and pragmatically to find possible common ground,” Meloni told Italy’s Senate on March 18, ahead of a March 20 meeting of EU leaders in Brussels.
She has maintained significantly better relations with US President Donald Trump’s White House than other European heads of state and was the only EU leader to attend his inauguration in the US Capitol’s Rotunda.
The commission, in charge of trade policy on behalf of all the EU’s members, said on March 12 it would impose the new tariffs on US imports including jeans, whiskey and motorcycles.
“As the United States are applying tariffs worth $28 billion, we are responding with countermeasures worth €26 billion,” said EC President Ursula von der Leyen, adding the new duties would take effect from between April 1 and 13.
Trump on February 11 had introduced a 25 per cent tariff on worldwide US imports of steel and aluminium.
He has also threatened to impose 200 per cent tariffs on alcohol imports from the EU, including Italian wine and spirits, if the bloc did not remove its “nasty” tariffs on US whiskey.
Meloni also criticised calls for Europe to pursue its security and defence aims without the US as “at best naïve and at worst crazy”.
Her comments came as von der Leyen argued the EU should buy arms for all its member states.
On March 18, von der Leyen proposed a “European Military Sales Mechanism”, under which the EU would purchase arms for a “strategic reserve” from which members could in turn buy.
That would represent a large-scale transfer of power to Brussels in what has previously been a national competence.
“We must buy more European,” said von der Leyen in a speech at the Royal Danish Military Academy in Copenhagen.
EU members “need to be able to fully rely on European defence supply chains”, she added.
The EU would not, though, be able to make the collective arms purchases before 2030, she admitted.
Meanwhile, “[former Italian PM] Mario Draghi offers a more convincing recipe to rearm Europe than von der Leyen,” argued Alberto Alemanno, professor of EU law at HEC Paris Business School.
In his own March 18 speech to lawmakers in Rome, Draghi said the EU needed to “define a chain of command of higher level that can coordinate heterogenous armies” and incorporate non-EU countries such as Norway and the UK into a broader European defence community.
This would “separate itself from national priorities and function as a continental defence system”, argued former European Central Bank head Draghi.
