EU Parliament Freezes Ratification of 2025 Trans-Atlantic Trade Pact After U.S. Court Nixes Tariffs, Trump Retaliates

Trade spats between close allies are hardly new: the 1963-64 “Chicken War” saw the U.S. slap a 25 % duty on European light trucks, and the 1993 GATT Round nearly collapsed over EU-U.S. agriculture fights. Yet each episode marked a broader swing in the global system. Today’s flare-up fits a century-long arc in which great-power governments alternately open and weaponise markets to project power—Smoot-Hawley (1930), Nixon’s 10 % import surcharge (1971), Reagan’s Section 301 cases (1980s), and Trump’s first-term tariffs (2018-20) all signposted moments when domestic politics overrode multilateral norms. The Supreme Court’s intervention revives a dormant constitutional check on executive trade authority, while Brussels’ pause signals that even staunch allies will not blindly swallow asymmetric deals. Over a 100-year horizon, the episode matters less for the immediate duties—numbers that can be dialled up or down—than for what it portends: a gradual erosion of post-1945 rules and a drift toward bloc-based, legally contested commerce, where courts and parliaments, not just executives, increasingly arbitrate the limits of economic coercion.