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The EU’s so-called trade “bazooka,” or Anti-Coercion Instrument, offers a range of punitive measures that can be used against trade rivals that try to threaten the bloc. Among them are restrictions on investments and access to public procurement schemes, as well as limits on intellectual property protections.
Renew leader Valérie Hayer called Trump’s moves “unacceptable” and said “it is now time to move from reliance to deterrence.”
“The EU should be prepared to deploy targeted and proportionate countermeasures,” Hayer said in a post on X. “The activation of the EU Anti-Coercion Instrument should be explicitly considered, as it was designed precisely for situations of economic intimidation of this nature.”
Bernd Lange, a German S&D MEP and chair of the European Parliament’s trade committee, also backed the unprecedented deployment of the “bazooka” in comments to POLITICO. “What we had in mind when we drafted the Anti-Coercive Measures Act is now coming to pass: If trade policy is used as a political lever, we can resist it with various measures. I therefore call on the EU Commission to initiate proceedings and an investigation immediately,” he said.
The S&D’s vice president for trade, Kathleen Van Brempt, joined the calls for the use of the Anti-Coercion Instrument. “It is nothing short of outrageous that Donald Trump is using tariffs and economic threats to force through an illegitimate territorial claim,” Van Brempt said in a statement. Approving the trade deal, she said, “would not be ‘pragmatic’, but downright foolish,” she said.
“If this is not coercion, then what is?” Van Brempt added.
Trump on Saturday announced a 10 percent additional tariff on European countries that have contributed troops to a small deployment that arrived in Greenland earlier this week. The levy will increase to 25 percent starting June 1, he declared, and will remain in force “until such time as a Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland.”
European leaders have reacted with fury, insisting that the deployment to Greenland is a response to Trump’s claims of growing Russian and Chinese threats to the island in the North Atlantic. European Council President António Costa warned Washington that the new tariffs will be met with a “joint response.”