The trade gap between the United States and the European Union ranges between $60 billion and $150 billion when services are included - well below the $300 billion figure President Donald Trump has repeatedly cited. The deficit is modest compared with $2 trillion in annual transatlantic trade flows and dwarfed by the $290 billion deficit Washington runs with China.
Anthony Luzzatto Gardner, who served as US ambassador to the EU from 2014 to 2017, laid out the case in Foreign Affairs, "Hvylya" reports. Gardner pushed back against Trump's characterization of the bloc as a "consortium" designed to "screw" the United States through unfair trade practices.
Before the 2025 US-EU trade agreement, the weighted average tariff was 1.5 percent for the United States and 1.3 percent for the EU - virtually identical. The EU does maintain high barriers in agriculture, but the United States itself protects many sectors of its economy, including farming. Trade deficits, Gardner argued, largely reflect macroeconomic factors such as low savings and excessive spending in the United States.
Trump has also objected to EU fines imposed on American technology companies. Gardner countered that US firms attracted regulatory scrutiny because of their dominant market position, not because of anti-American bias. He noted that Washington imposed more than $50 billion in penalties on European banks between 2014 and 2024 for infractions including fraud and sanctions evasion - a record of extraterritorial enforcement that undercuts the administration's argument that no foreign authority should dare investigate American companies.
Trump told his cabinet in February 2025 that the EU "was formed in order to screw the United States." Gardner described this view as a dangerous caricature of a bloc that has aligned with Washington far more often than it has diverged.
Earlier, "Hvylya" reported on how Europe sits on untapped energy resources it has politically foreclosed.