Trade has become a tool in the global struggle for technological supremacy according to EU trade chief

EU Trade Commissioner Phil Hogan visited the United States and expressed the wish to ‘refresh, recalibrate and generally reclaim the shared trade agenda of the EU and US in the coming months’. At the center of the bilateral talks were US complaints against the digital trade tax imposed by France and EU government subsidies for Airbus. During a keynote address at Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Washington DC, Hogan recalled Europe and US’s ‘shared history of global leadership’ in shaping ‘the global trading system and the multilateral institutions that govern it’. Nevertheless, he mentioned that this order is threatened by new challenges. ‘Trade politics is no longer exclusively about trade policy. It is often a proxy for security, technology, geopolitics and more. In particular, trade has become a tool in the global struggle for technological supremacy’. Hogan urged for increased cooperation said that either Europe and the US ‘shape the response to these challenges together, or these challenges shape, divide and diminish us’.