Trump keeps escalating his trade threats. This time, Europe isn’t biting.

Washington is again ratcheting up the pressure on the European Union with new tariff threats. Brussels’ response is strikingly different from a year ago: Don’t retaliate, don’t put on a show for Donald Trump, and don’t let him dictate the timetable. Trump’s recent threat to “immediately initiate” a trade investigation over the European Commission’s $1 billion fine against Google came on top of new tariffs on the EU and dozens of other trading partners, and continuing pressure from Washington over drug pricing. But rather than sounding alarms and scrambling to respond to this new phase of Trump’s global trade war, the EU has shown public restraint — a reaction that suggests that the 27-member bloc has become less susceptible to Trump’s pressure tactics. This year, European capitals saw their united rejection of Trump’s Greenland ambitions fail to trigger a wider transatlantic rupture. His most sweeping tariffs were struck down by the Supreme Court, and their successors have drawn legal challenges. Now, with a chance that Trump’s grip on Washington loosens in the November midterm elections, Europeans are happy to play for time. “It is a strategy of buying time through dialogue,” Bernd Lange, a German member of the European Parliament and chair of its Committee on International Trade, said in an interview. “The Commission’s approach is to move away from anything that could be seen as legally binding and focus instead on dialogue forums, consultation and areas where cooperation is possible.” Last year, Brussels repeatedly bristled at Trump’s tariff threats, which at times reached as high as 50 percent, before agreeing to a trade truce at the U.S. president’s golf resort in Turnberry, Scotland. After months of delays that tested Washington’s patience, the EU fulfilled its side of the bargain by passing legislation in June to allow U.S. industrial and some agricultural goods to enter the bloc duty-free. A USTR official, granted anonymity to share the administration’s thinking, credited the EU for implementing “key commitments,” in the Turnberry deal, “such as massive tariff reductions for U.S. exports, and has made concrete commitments on a number of other burdensome regulatory matters.” “Any technical talks will be about implementing the remaining commitments, and the U.S. side anticipates this will move at pace,” the official added. The White House did not respond to a request for comment. The EU law, however, also includes guardrails should Trump threaten the bloc again. It didn’t take long for him to do so. While the 10 percent tariff the U.S. government rolled out July 23 does not violate the Turnberry agreement, which caps U.S. duties on most EU goods at 15 percent, Trump’s threats to investigate Europe’s digital restrictions in the wake of the Google fine would likely do so. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative has yet to launch an official investigation, but the official there confirmed to POLITICO that the agency expected “to initiate the investigation soon”. That could allow the White House to layer on more tariffs on EU imports. Jamieson Greer appears before the Senate Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies in Washington on Dec. 9, 2025. | Will Oliver/EPA U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer is also conducting a separate trade investigation into Germany’s pharmaceutical pricing and has suggested he could launch similar reviews of other European countries’ drug pricing practices as well. Those investigations, however, will take months to resolve, if not longer. “The second phase of the trade war touches a nerve in Europe: sovereignty. Whether it concerns taxation, health care systems or competition policy, these are areas the EU sees as core to its autonomy,” said Jeromin Zettelmeyer, a former International Monetary Fund and German government official who now heads Brussels-based think tank Bruegel. “At the same time, Trump no longer appears as pol