U.S. Allies Jostle to Win Exemptions From Trump Tariffs<br />Cecilia Malmstrom, the European commissioner for trade, said during a news conference in Brussels on Wednesday<br />that any fight back against the United States would be “by the book.”<br />But even as European Union leaders prepared for retaliatory action, they also recalled the long history of trans-Atlantic bonhomie.<br />“How India or any other country could be a threat to the U. S. within the steel industry, I don’t know,” said Shivramkrishnan<br />Hariharan, the commercial director of Essar Steel, a large steel manufacturer based in Mumbai.<br />The tariffs “have nothing to do with the security of the United States,” Georg Streiter,<br />a spokesman for German Chancellor Angela Merkel, said at a news briefing Friday.<br />“Working very quickly on a security agreement so we don’t have to impose steel<br />or aluminum tariffs on our ally, the great nation of Australia,” he said.<br />A country that offers something in return for an exemption could set a precedent, allowing the White House to make further demands in the future in return for access to the United States market,<br />and fracture any sense of unity between capitals from Brussels to Seoul that have roundly criticized the tariffs.<br />“The difficulty is that a huge portion of U. S. steel imports come from core allies like Nafta, Japan, Australia,<br />and Brazil,” said Seth Rosenfeld, an analyst at Jefferies, an investment bank, in London.
