Trump's Team Takes Its Fight to a Wary Europe

"BRUSSELS -- Europe gets a turn in President Trump's firing line this week.

Senior administration officials are heading across the Atlantic to tackle points of tension including tech regulation, trade, military spending and events in Ukraine. Leaders from the European Union and North Atlantic Treaty Organization will work to convince Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that the U.S. and Europe are more aligned than at odds.

They have talking points ready on trade and defense. But on tech policy, the two economies are moving in diametrically opposite directions. Trump, Vance and congressional leaders, as well as tech leaders including X owner Elon Musk and Meta Platforms Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, have harshly criticized EU tech regulations.

Some of the rules are aimed at the world's biggest tech companies and social-media platforms, based on criteria such as European revenue and user numbers. Most of the companies large enough to meet the thresholds are American.

"Europe has an ever-increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship, and making it difficult to build anything innovative there," Zuckerberg said last month.

Trump has referred to trade with Europe as an "atrocity." The trio of administration officials will hold the new team's first in-person meeting with senior European leaders at an artificial-intelligence summit in Paris, NATO meetings in Brussels and an international-security conference in Munich. The Munich Security Conference, which starts Friday, will be dominated by the events in Ukraine, with Europe pushing for continued U.S. support for Kyiv. Trump has said he has started direct talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin about resolving the conflict.

EU leaders hope they eventually will be able to negotiate with Trump on defense and trade. He has berated Europe for insufficient military spending. Spending is increasing, and European leaders are seeking ways to shoulder more responsibility for their security, albeit more slowly than Trump wants.

The U.S. had a goods-trade deficit of $209 billion and a services-trade surplus of $77 billion with the EU in 2023, according to the Commerce Department. That left the U.S. with a deficit of $132 billion overall. EU leaders have discussed buying more U.S. liquefied natural gas and weaponry.

Tech is a fundamentally different issue. The EU has few large tech companies and has enacted some of the world's most stringent regulations on the sector. That contrast has put U.S. tech champions on a collision course with Brussels.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), a Trump ally, last month wrote to the EU's top tech regulator about the effect of its Digital Services Act on free speech in the U.S. EU officials say the DSA was written to preserve freedom of expression while mitigating risks related to certain content.

Musk's X was charged under the DSA last year and could face a fine of up to 6% of worldwide revenue. The EU has separately charged Apple and Meta with breaching a digital-competition law in cases that could lead to fines of up to 10% of the companies' worldwide revenue.

The bloc has previously issued hefty fines against Google, Apple and Meta for antitrust violations.

"They're American companies, and they shouldn't be doing that," Trump said during a video appearance last month at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. "As far as I'm concerned it's a form of taxation."

EU officials reject Trump's characterization. Antitrust probes are agnostic to where a company was established, a spokesman said.

Officials say U.S. pressure won't upend continuing probes into U.S. tech companies. EU technical teams investigating X, Meta, Apple and Google have received no political direction to stop their work, a person familiar with the investigations said.

Some American officials and lawmakers expressed outrage over an EU official's letter to Musk last summer suggesting that X's handling of a planned live discussion between Musk and Trump might violate the law. Vance characterized the dispute as a matter of freedom of speech and suggested the U.S. could link it to support for NATO.

Another tech clash looms on the horizon.

Trump last month withdrew U.S. support for a global tax agreement and directed agencies to investigate "discriminatory and extraterritorial" taxes in other jurisdictions.

France, Italy, the U.K. and other governments have levied digital-services taxes on some of the local revenue of large tech companies in recent years. They have previously said they would remove those taxes once a global agreement on taxing rights is in place.

Trump said in an executive order last month that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent should within 60 days present options for protective measures or other retaliation against countries with taxes that disproportionately affect American companies, setting up a possible confrontation with the EU and some of its member countries this spring." [1]

Tariffs will solve all these problems for the USA. Tariffs will help to accelerate the death of the EU's industry, wounded by absence of computerization in the EU and high energy prices there since refusing to use North Stream 2 to buy cheap Russian energy as a result of politicking. Goats start wandering the streets of Rome again. In case you are surprised - yes, Nord Stream 2 is still functional.

1. World News: Trump's Team Takes Its Fight to a Wary Europe. Michaels, Daniel; Kim Mackrael.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 11 Feb 2025: A8.