A few morning-after thoughts on last night's EU-US trade announcement. First up: bold move from the Commission. A big surprise to many including members of Congress and EU member states (and, rather less importantly, me). 1/n ft.com/content/b97410…
Some of the deal can easily be achieved as they are meaningless - the soybean and LNG parts, which the EU is already doing. If Trump continues to believe these are concessions he is v gullible indeed, and hats off to the Commission for fooling him. Let's no-one tell him, eh. 2/n
Some bits are clearly impossible & will have to be quietly forgotten to make deal work eg ending all non-tariff barriers & non-auto industrial subsidies. This wd mean wholesale dismantling of EU regulation. Zero subsidies also means no cash for Airbus or Boeing. Non-starter. 3/n
The doable bit that is actually new would be cutting all non-auto industrial tariffs to nil. This had basically already been agreed in TTIP. It's not earth-shattering as they are already low, but it's substantive. 4/n
However the deal also means the EU breaking own pledges and principles: 1. apparently starting talks despite steel/aluminium tariffs still in place. 2. ignoring its new rule of only agreeing FTAs with signatories to Paris Agreement on climate. 5/n
3. (slightly more arguably) signing a deal excluding agriculture and cars contravenes the spirit if not the letter of the WTO rule requiring FTAs to cover "substantially all trade". All hypocritical, but maybe EU considers them necessary hypocrisies. It's good at those. 6/n
Overall it's a deal to avert a trade war, not significantly to advance liberalisation. I'm sceptical it will stick, not least because Trump's agreements on trade have a habit of unravelling rapidly and it's essentially based on conning him. But I've been wrong before. 7/7
