Patience gone, EU freezes trade vote as Trump tariffs bust through agreed ceiling

BRUSSELS (CN) — European lawmakers pulled the plug Monday on a vote to ratify the EU-U.S. Turnberry trade agreement, saying Trump's new tariff orders had already pushed duties on a chunk of European goods above what the two sides agreed — and the path forward is anyone's guess.

The Turnberry Agreement, struck in July 2025 at a summit in Scotland, set a 15% tariff on EU goods entering the United States in exchange for Brussels dropping duties on U.S. industrial exports. It was designed to end a transatlantic trade war that erupted after Trump imposed sweeping tariffs on European goods using emergency powers. The Supreme Court ruled Friday those emergency tariffs were illegal.

It is the second time in two months Washington has pulled the rug out from under the deal. In January, Parliament froze the agreement after Trump threatened tariffs on EU countries that wouldn't back his push to acquire Greenland.

The immediate trigger was Friday's Supreme Court ruling that Trump had overstepped his constitutional authority by using a 1977 emergency law to slap tariffs on goods from virtually every country. Within hours, Trump announced a replacement 10% global tariff under a different statute — then bumped it to 15% in a Saturday post on Truth Social, calling the ruling "ridiculous, poorly written and extraordinarily anti-American."

Trump has kept up the attacks since. By Monday he had posted at least six messages denouncing the court, calling the justices "incompetent" and claiming the decision had paradoxically given him "far more powers and strength" than before. He also warned trading partners directly: any country that tries to exploit the ruling would face "a much higher tariff, and worse." "BUYER BEWARE!!!" he wrote.

But the replacement tariffs come with a catch: they're temporary. The law Trump is now using limits him to 150 days, after which Congress would have to sign off on an extension. No president has ever used it before, and legal experts say it could face its own court challenge.

Trump has promised to use the window to build longer-term tariff authorities through other trade laws — but that takes time, and whatever rates emerge won't necessarily be the ones Turnberry locked in.

A deal in doubt

Bernd Lange, the German lawmaker who runs the European Parliament's trade committee, told colleagues at Monday's emergency session that the problem isn't just political — it is mathematical. Trump's new levy isn't a flat 15% rate. "It's not a baseline, it's a surcharge," Lange told reporters after the meeting.

That means the new duties stack on top of existing ones, pushing roughly 7 to 8% of EU exports to the U.S. above the rates Turnberry had locked in — except on products where the U.S. baseline duty is already zero.

Lawmakers had only just resolved a weekslong internal fight over the legislation, agreeing on two safeguards: a six-month review to address steel and aluminum tariffs — still at 50% and untouched by Turnberry — and a clause allowing the deal to be suspended if Washington again threatened EU territorial integrity. That hard-won compromise is now on hold alongside everything else.

"[The surcharge] clearly breaches Turnberry," said Monday Ignacio García Bercero, a former senior EU trade negotiator now at Bruegel. He also flagged what may be the longer-term threat: the administration has already said it will push ahead with new Section 232 national security tariff investigations, an authority the court didn't touch and that carries no time limit or rate cap.

Unlike the temporary Section 122 surcharge Trump rushed out Friday, 232 gives the White House open-ended power to target specific sectors — machinery, medical devices — that Turnberry never covered. Brussels has no current leverage to negotiate those away.

After consulting with the EU's Trade Commissioner Maros Šefčovič and getting a read from Parliament's own lawyers, Lange told colleagues the uncertainty was too great to move forward. "Nobody knows what will happen after," he said. "And it's unclear if there will be additional measures or how the United States will really guarantee that the deal of Turnberry will be respected."

Lange was careful to frame it as a timeout, not a breakup — he stopped short of suspending a plenary vote currently scheduled for March 11. "Everything is possible, we need clarity," he said. "The deal is a deal, but it has to be respected from the other side as well."

Šefčovič, who attended Monday's meeting, said he had been in touch with U.S. counterparts over the weekend and urged lawmakers to proceed with the March vote as planned. But he agreed that clarity was needed. "A deal is a deal and we have to respect it," he said.

European leaders spent the weekend taking stock. France was the most vocal. Macron warned Saturday against celebrating the Supreme Court ruling too quickly. "We shouldn't go too fast," he said.

Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot went further Sunday, questioning whether the deal was even still legally valid. "One may be permitted to doubt that," he told French radio. Paris has also floated activating the EU's so-called Anti-Coercion Instrument — a retaliatory tool that would allow the bloc to impose tariff surcharges, exclude U.S. firms from public procurement and restrict their investment in Europe — though the idea has met resistance from other EU countries and the European Commission, the EU's executive arm.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, due to meet Trump in early March, said he would go to Washington with a coordinated European position. He called the Supreme Court ruling "reassuring" — but noted that tariffs "primarily harm the country that levies the tariffs."

The commission pressed Washington for "full clarity" on its next steps Sunday, warning the current situation was "not conducive" to the mutually beneficial trade relationship both sides had agreed to. Šefčovič spoke directly with U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on Saturday.

Asked Monday whether those calls had produced assurances that Washington would honor the deal, commission spokesman Olof Gill declined to say. "It's up to the U.S. to clearly show us what path they are taking," he told reporters.

The flat 15% rate has an unintended consequence. Countries like India and Brazil, which had been bracing for steeper country-specific tariffs, now find themselves on the same footing as Europe — without having sat across the table from Washington to get there.

That stop-start pattern — agree, suspend, resume, suspend again — has left European officials wondering whether any deal with this White House can actually be made to stick. Trump's move to swap one legally shaky tariff regime for another within hours of losing at the Supreme Court only deepened those doubts.

Courthouse News correspondent Yuval Molina is based in Brussels, Belgium.