US President Donald Trump is prepared to quickly ramp up a trade war with China and has told aides he is ready to impose tariffs on $200 billion more in Chinese imports as soon as a public comment period on the plan ends next week, Bloomberg News reported on Thursday. EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom said Thursday that “this could be, possibly, a more limited trade agreement focused on tariffs on goods only.”

As an attempt to ease trade tensions, U.S. President Donald Trump and EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker agreed last month to start talks intended to achieve “zero tariffs” and “zero subsidies” on non-automotive industrial goods. “If these non-federal actors were a country,” it pointed out, “their economy would be the third largest in the world, bigger than all but two national parties to the Paris Agreement.”

In his withdrawal statement, Trump stated that “the United States will cease all implementation of the nonbinding Paris accord and the draconian financial and economic burdens the agreement imposes on our country.” That accord’s main aim was to keep the global temperature rise below 2 degrees centigrade from the preindustrial level. Trump, in an interview with Bloomberg, said of the EU proposal to scrap auto tariffs: “It’s not good enough.”

“Their consumer habits are to buy their cars, not to buy our cars,” Trump added, according to Bloomberg.
European Commissioner for Trade Cecilia Malmström proposes to reduce all European Union import tariffs, also on automobiles, to zero if the United States reciprocates. President of the United States Donald Trump threatens to quit the World Trade Organization.