EU leaders discuss new US trade proposal • FRANCE 24 English

for then we’ll cross now to our Brussels correspondent Dave Keading uh hi Dave so to start with the war in Ukraine is this another kind of mostly symbolic show of support or do you do you think it’ll it’ll make a real difference on the ground the show of support was mostly symbolic there wasn’t actually much of a discussion about defense capabilities yesterday because the leaders had spent so much time talking about defense at NATO uh what they did do was ask the European Commission President Ursula Lion to research uh how military spending could be best done to be most efficient and come back to them at the next summit in October that report from the commission is basically going to try to avoid duplication as all of this new military spending is happening in order to meet that new 5% target they want to make sure that countries aren’t unnecessarily duplicating the same amount of spending um but other than that there wasn’t much good news for Ukraine yesterday and there was a whole lot of bad news uh first of all Hungary vetoed the uh language that would have uh endorsed Ukraine’s membership of the European Union so they had to adopt that with just 26 of the 27 countries uh that’s mostly a statement of intent however they need Hungary uh in order to move forward with Ukraine’s EU assession and actually Victor Orban the prime minister held a referendum that’s been greatly criticized as being kind of a sham um yesterday where they asked Hungarians whether they want Ukraine to join the European Union and supposedly the result came back at 95% of Hungarians saying no uh and so Victor Orban is basically digging in his heels on that then separately we had the prime minister of Slovakia Robert Fzo veto an attempt to move forward on an 18th package of sanctions against Russia there is some hope that they can maybe convince him to end that veto his objection is that this latest sanctions package and something related to it would end Russian all imports of Russian uh oil and gas and he is worried that Slovakia would face an energy crisis in the winter as a result of that of that he’s also worried that actually that would be subject to legal challenge by Russia um so you know overall not much progress statements of symbolic support but more backwards movement for Ukraine yesterday than forwards movement
okay Dave so so what about the issue of Donald Trump’s tariffs i mean presumably the fears about the effects that they would have across the European Union are the source of consensus amongst all of the members so was there any progress made then on addressing that nothing concrete but we did see a big shift in mood music yesterday so coming into the summit we had the German Chancellor Friedrich Mertz uh basically saying the commission should just do a a quick and dirty deal with the US to avoid this 50% tariff threat french President Emanuel Macron was saying “No no no we need to be strong don’t just give in to what the United States wants we need to actually respond with uh threats that they we could start taxing services imports that the US hugely relies on for uh services to Europeans so yesterday it looked like Macron President Mcron was softening his stance he had been saying that the EU should only offer a deal if the US is willing to go down to 0% tariffs yesterday he signaled that actually 10% the baseline rate that Trump is applying on everyone would be acceptable that’s what the UK accepted in order to get its little mini deal um and also he seemed to signal that he would be willing for the commission to make some concessions now yesterday last night we got news that the US had responded to the the commission’s latest offer to try to avoid that deadline the deadline is supposedly on the 9th of July but when you’re talking to people here I think most people aren’t feeling that worried about it because they’re assuming that Trump is going to roll over again as he did in the past uh we’ll see we’ll see what kind of progress they make next week as it gets closer to that deadline day of July 9th people may start to get a little more nervous
dave Keading in Brussels thank you very much

European Union leaders considered new US trade proposals ahead of the July 9 deadline for US President Donald Trump’s tariffs at a Brussels summit on Thursday. They also addressed the Mercosur trade agreement, Russia sanctions, and restructuring the World Trade Organization. Dave Keating reports from Brussels.
#EuropeanUnion #UStradeproposal #Ukraine

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6 comments

  1. My wife is Iranian and I'm German. Her country had a real war with the U.S. and my country is facing a trade war with the U.S. – At least I expect that nobody will die in Germany from this. However, economically our peril may be the greater.

  3. europe is no longer relevant. It can only do the following:
    1. CRY: chairman of MSC, former pm of france.
    2. BEG: everyone went to wasington
    3. FOLLOW: follow US tightly
    4. CALL TRUMP DADDY.

  6. Europe is still fighting the world with their egos. Greatly offended them that U.S. sees them as children. When Europe controls the democrats and liberal media in the states. It's why they feel as though they can ridicule Trump. And use our military and budget to punish those who disrespect them.

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