EU to Trump on tariffs: We’ll retaliate when we’re ready, not when you tweet

Trump had hit the 27-nation bloc with a 20 percent duty on all goods. Under pressure as financial markets melted down, he halved the levy to 10 percent — the baseline he has set in his bid to bring investment and industrial jobs lost to globalization back home.

So it happened that, on Thursday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen suspended EU tariffs on €20.9 billion in U.S. exports before they even took effect. It was the retaliation that never happened. At least not yet.

“We want to give negotiations a chance,” von der Leyen said in a social media post.

That was followed by a kicker: “If negotiations are not satisfactory, our countermeasures will kick in. Preparatory work on further countermeasures continues. As I have said before, all options remain on the table.”

By design as much as by strategy, the bloc’s reaction to Trump is moving slowly, anchored in legal justification and carefully weighted through internal consensus — with businesses, but most importantly, with the bloc’s member countries.

That’s because while trade policy may be the Commission’s turf, Brussels still needs political cover.