EU shows geopolitical muscle with new trade weapon against blackmail

 

 Brussels will try to increase the European Union's geopolitical weight by proposing new political weapons that will make it easier to impose sanctions on economic rivals such as China - and even the United States, Politico reported in its Old Continent edition.

Although the form of economic howitzer the EU is referring to is certainly new, European free trade countries and trade experts are already warning that it could explode in the face of the world's largest trading bloc.

 The European Commission's proposal for weapons against coercion comes after years of complaints from the EU that it is vulnerable to economic blackmail by countries that use the division between European nations for their own ends, as retaliatory sanctions can only be imposed unanimously. To counter this weakness, this new instrument will allow the Commission to impose trade sanctions against a country outside the Bloc, which the 27 EU countries can only block by a majority.

 In recent years, the EU has often been at the mercy of its rivals, experts in Divide and Rule games. China has threatened French wine and German cars and even promised not to buy Airbus planes in a bid to shut down a number of EU policy initiatives. Similarly, Brussels has challenged US tariffs on European steel and aluminum, after Washington stressed that European metals pose a threat to US national security. 

 Brussels is angry that Europe has been tied to attempts to re-establish ties with Iran by re-imposing US sanctions on the Donald Trump administration. At the time, several European diplomats argued that part of the function of the instrument to combat coercion should be to prevent the United States from dictating EU foreign policy, although it is unclear whether the proposal to be presented today will provide a meaningful way to circumvent these types of sanctions from Washington.

 The new draft law, which is available to the editors, says that Europe is facing a "legislative gap" on how to respond to this kind of "real policy", while trade is becoming an "increasingly serious weapon in a geo-economic context".

"The Union does not currently have a legislative framework for action against economic coercion. None of the existing legal instruments addresses the issue of economic coercion, the draft said.