POLICY BRIEF June 2022 - LEVERAGING TRADE POLICY FOR THE EU’S STRATEGIC AUTONOMY

But EU trade policy, pillar of the agenda of the French Presidency of based on the exclusive competence of the EU, the Council of the EU.2 Today, isolating Russia is particularly effective in enabling Europeans economically to put pressure on it to end the to act on the world stage by mobilising the full invasion of Ukraine is a litmus test for the EU’s weight of the single market. [...] The geopoliticisation of trade materialised The explosion of digital trade and the regulatory with US President Donald Trump’s aggressive issues linked to the circulation and storage tariff policy and the start of a decoupling of US of data are also fuelling a war of influence in supply chains from the Chinese technological third countries. [...] The US seems to aim at a return to the WTO’s 2.2 The taste of strategic autonomy General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), under which there was no binding nature for the The cohesion of the EU member states in the parties to the dispute. [...] The economy – acknowledged on 9 March 2022, the balance struck between the coverage of Russian invasion is a “final warning” to reinforce the instrument and the burden it places on the French vision of open strategic autonomy contractors and bidders will allow more than to “defend” the EU:22 more protection without 70% of the public procurement value in the protectionism. [...] However, the use of the instruments in this toolkit will be determined by the ability of member states to agree on the type of challenge posed by China, the role they wish for the EU in the context of the decoupling of the US from China, and thus the level of dependence on China that they are prepared to accept.