To elaborate on what others have said re: retaliation, EU tariffs on goods are generally higher than those of the USA[0], so if anything this will just close th

To elaborate on what others have said re: retaliation, EU tariffs on goods are generally higher than those of the USA[0], so if anything this will just close the gap and make total tariffs paid more even. The USA in general has the lowest import tariffs on goods of all major countries (even after all the Trump escalations). It also has a large goods import gap (importing much more than it exports). It makes up a lot of that gap in services, so when France passed a tax specifically targeting its most important "service" companies (internet giants), it sees that as a HUGE trade escalation, even though that absolute tax those companies pay in Europe was previously laughably small in absolute terms. One could argue that despite all the headline drama, evening US-EU goods tariffs and making US tech companies pay taxes in Europe lands on a more equitable arrangement, rather than de facto subsidizing EU agriculture and US tech. [0]It's hard to find intuitively meaningful numbers for this stuff since it's so complicated, but you can see that the EU "general goods" tariff has a mean average of 5.1% vs 3.4% for the USA here: https://www.wto.org/english/res_e/booksp_e/tariff_profiles20_e.pdf https://www.wto.org/english/res_e/booksp_e/tariff_profiles20...