Europe’s Trump Playbook: Offer Carrots but Warn That You Have a Big Stick

The European Union’s so-called Trump task force spent 2024 preparing for a possible trade dispute. Specifics are secret, but guiding principles are becoming clear.

The European Union spent last year drawing up secret plans for what the bloc would do if President Trump made good on his threats of imposing higher tariffs on European goods and services.

Now, as those threats go from hypothetical to potentially imminent, its plans are coming into broad focus.

Hit specific, politically sensitive sectors — like products made in Republican states — with targeted tariffs meant to inflict maximum pain. Don’t escalate into a tit-for-tat competition if it’s avoidable. Do move quickly and decisively, potentially using new tactics that could hit service providers like big Silicon Valley technology firms.

It’s a rough playbook — described broadly by three diplomats who requested anonymity because the plans were still being discussed — that Europe would prefer not to use. The first goal is to avoid a trade war by offering to negotiate and dangling carrots, including more European purchases of American gas, which Mr. Trump has been pushing for. E.U. officials have warned that a trade war between the bloc and the United States would be a self-defeating disaster that would cost both sides and benefit geopolitical rivals like China and Russia.

But Mr. Trump has kept the continent in his cross hairs, saying this week that the bloc would “definitely” face tariffs and “pretty soon.” If appeasement fails, Europe is broadcasting that it is ready to hit back.

“We are prepared,” Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, said during a news conference this week in Brussels, when asked whether she was ready to fend off tariff increases from the new U.S. administration.