EU and United States commit to mitigate trade tensions and seek WTO reform

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and US President Donald Trump announced they will take a series of steps to mitigate the trade tensions between them. They also plan to avoid introducing new unilateral tariffs, as the two sides will now set the sights on negotiating towards ‘zero tariffs, zero non-tariff barriers, and zero subsidies on non-auto industrial goods’, according to Donald Trump. Leaders also pledged to set up a working group to address WTO reform in order to ‘address unfair trading practices, including intellectual property theft, forced technology transfer, industrial subsidies, distortions created by state-owned enterprises, and overcapacity’.