Was Hummer und Hühner über die Europas Handelslogik erzählen

The European Union’s trade deal with the Trump administration has met with fierce criticism because on its face, it is full of giveaways to Washington and devoid of victories for the bloc’s 27 nations.

But to understand Europe’s approach, consider the lobster.

E.U. officials made a variety of concessions to seal the agreement. Among them was keeping tariffs on lobster imports at zero, extending a 2020 deal that had been set to expire. Other sweeteners included a pledge to buy $750 billion in American energy over three years and a loose promise to make hundreds of billions in investments in American firms and technologies.

Look closely at those offerings, though, and a pattern emerges. The European Union has handed America feel-good triumphs while dodging, at least for now, several of its most painful demands.

Lobsters are a case in point. They are politically relevant in the United States, where the Maine-centric industry is a point of pride and has powerful champions in Congress. But they are neither economically important nor especially politically sensitive in Europe.

And while Europeans offered to freely import the crustaceans, they resisted the Trump administration’s demands that they change other food-related rules to allow for more imports of America’s beef or chicken — far more politically explosive topics across the bloc.

“They must be giggling to themselves in Brussels,” said Marc Busch, a professor of international business diplomacy at Georgetown University who has for years followed food tariffs.

He noted that Europe has not agreed to change crucial sanitary regulations that ban hormone-raised beef or acid-washed chicken. Those can still be used to block more politically important agricultural imports, Mr. Busch said, “literally until the cows come home.”

European officials have been clear that the setup happened by design. A senior E.U. official on Tuesday told reporters that while the bloc will extend the zero tariffs on lobsters and drop trade barriers on bison meat, which is not widely produced in Europe, it will not be changing its policies to take more beef.

The cattle industry has a powerful political presence in France, Belgium and elsewhere. Lobsters were a simpler way to create agricultural good will.

Europe has spent the past several months threatening to impose sky-high tariffs on the New England seafood if no trade deal were reached. By extending zero tariffs instead, the European Union will give American lobster exporters a chance to expand their footprint on the continent. Europe is a major market for lobster, but it buys most of the crustaceans from Canada, with which the bloc has a free-trade agreement.

This fragment is key:

>E.U. officials made a variety of concessions to seal the agreement. Among them was keeping tariffs on lobster imports at zero, extending a 2020 deal that had been set to expire. Other sweeteners included a pledge to buy $750 billion in American energy over three years and a loose promise to make hundreds of billions in investments in American firms and technologies.

>Look closely at those offerings, though, and a pattern emerges. The European Union has handed America feel-good triumphs while dodging, at least for now, several of its most painful demands.

>Lobsters are a case in point. They are politically relevant in the United States, where the Maine-centric industry is a point of pride and has powerful champions in Congress. But they are neither economically important nor especially politically sensitive in Europe.

>And while Europeans offered to freely import the crustaceans, they resisted the Trump administration’s demands that they change other food-related rules to allow for more imports of America’s beef or chicken — far more politically explosive topics across the bloc.