{"id":246293,"date":"2025-07-07T21:47:13","date_gmt":"2025-07-07T21:47:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/246293\/"},"modified":"2025-07-07T21:47:13","modified_gmt":"2025-07-07T21:47:13","slug":"brexit-deal-kills-the-chance-of-a-meaningful-u-s-uk-free-trade-agreement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/246293\/","title":{"rendered":"Brexit Deal Kills the Chance of a Meaningful U.S.-UK Free-Trade Agreement"},"content":{"rendered":"

The world watched in suspense when Donald Trump announced sweeping \u201cLiberation Day<\/a>\u201d tariffs, and countries throughout the world rushed to negotiate. The first resulting trade deal<\/a> was with America\u2019s historic ally, the United Kingdom (UK). Publicly and privately, many hope<\/a> that this will merely be an interim step toward the comprehensive agreement that President Trump offered the UK in his first term.<\/p>\n

Yet those hopes faced a blow last month with the announcement of a trade deal between the UK and European Union (EU). Crucially for the UK, this agreement reopens the EU market for many UK food exports. Yet this market access came at a significant cost, whereby the UK agreed to work toward \u201cdynamic alignment<\/a>\u201d with EU food and agricultural standards.<\/p>\n

In laymen\u2019s terms, the UK announced an ultimate goal to adopt EU regulatory standards, including future changes, for their own market, as the price of enabling agricultural trade with the EU. Critically, these provisions will be overseen by the European Court of Justice, and British courts will have no role.<\/p>\n

This has obvious echoes with the \u201ccommon rulebook<\/a>\u201d that former British Prime Minister Theresa May proposed in 2018 to allow \u201cfrictionless trade\u201d with the EU after Brexit. This so-called \u201ccommon rulebook\u201d was in fact simply the EU rulebook, which the UK proposed to adopt, without the input and veto rights that they had when still part of the EU. Unhappiness with this proposal was a major driver in Theresa May\u2019s fall from power; adopting EU regulations wholesale would beg the question of why the UK left the EU in the first place, and would leave the UK impotent in future trade negotiations.<\/p>\n

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Such a regulatory stance would effectively render any trade discussions with the UK futile. Of course, at the time the British Government insisted that this approach did not make a U.S.-UK trade deal impossible, but President Trump publicly disagreed<\/a>. If President Trump was right then, which he was, how could he be wrong now?<\/p>\n

The recent U.S.-UK trade deal promises to create a potential $5 billion market access opportunity for U.S. exporters in the UK market by lowering UK tariffs on certain U.S. products. However, the biggest obstacles to U.S. trade with the EU and UK are not tariffs at all, but rather non-tariff barriers, especially for agriculture. Globally, agriculture has been one of the U.S.\u2019s most successful export sectors, boasting an overall agricultural trade surplus until 2019<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Yet U.S. farmers have long struggled to trade on equal terms with the EU, with a bilateral agricultural trade deficit emerging in the late 1990\u2019s. Today, more than half of our net at $32 billion agricultural trade deficit<\/a> is attributable to the EU<\/a>. in 2024.<\/p>\n

Policymakers watched helplessly for decades as the agricultural trade surplus with the EU dwindled and then reversed, and as the deficit then worsened, not because of high tariffs, but because the EU uses regulatory standards to exclude competitive U.S. products. Most famously, the EU uses safety standards to prohibit imports of chlorine-washed chicken and hormone-treated beef, effectively banning whole sectors of U.S. agricultural exports. Ever wonder why food is so much more expensive there?<\/p>\n

If you think that you must have missed reports of Americans getting sick from eating chicken and beef, think again. There is no scientific evidence that U.S. meat is less healthy, so the EU created a so-called \u201cprecautionary principle<\/a>\u201d to justify banning U.S. food products on health grounds, even absent scientific evidence.<\/p>\n

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Similarly, the EU uses \u201cGeographical Indications<\/a>\u201d to effectively prohibit whole classes of products being sold from outside the EU. Many cheeses and wines, for example, cannot be made outside the EU, even when the place of origin is clearly stated on the label. The EU then outlaws non-geographic adjectives used to describe these goods.<\/p>\n

So, for example, not only is wine labeled as \u201cCalifornia Champagne\u201d banned, but such producers are not even allowed to mention the \u201cm\u00e9thode champenoise\u201d on the label. Without even being able to describe products to consumers, how can they possibly be sold?<\/p>\n

There will be no point discussing these issues with the UK, if they simply follow the EU rulebook. Many will argue that the UK and U.S. could still achieve a trade deal in other sectors, given extensive trade in legal and financial services between our countries, along with pharmaceuticals, automobiles, and a host of other products.<\/p>\n

Yet how does the Senate get to 51 votes without farm state senators? And what does the U.S. gain from a \u201ccomprehensive\u201d trade agreement that excludes one of our most vital export sectors, due to a UK commitment to follow a different party\u2019s laws?<\/p>\n

The world hasn\u2019t changed that much since President Trump declared that the UK\u2019s proposed \u201ccommon rulebook\u201d would prevent a free trade agreement with the U.S. Then as now, any UK commitment to observe the EU\u2019s protectionist agricultural standards would smother comprehensive U.S.-UK trade talks before they start.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The world watched in suspense when Donald Trump announced sweeping \u201cLiberation Day\u201d tariffs, and countries throughout the world…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":246294,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5226],"tags":[802,748,2000,299,5187,1699,4884,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-246293","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-brexit","8":"tag-brexit","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-eu","11":"tag-europe","12":"tag-european","13":"tag-european-union","14":"tag-great-britain","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114814153131265766","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246293\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/246294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}