After three years of pulling, the United States and the European Union finally decided to take a step back on the issue of steel and aluminum tariffs, the former exempting some tariffs and the latter reducing retaliatory tariffs. For the United States and Europe, this agreement is a must, after all, both sides have suffered heavy losses in tariff costs. For the United States and Europe, the agreement is another small step in U.S.-European cooperation following the truce over aircraft subsidies, and perhaps a more comprehensive U.S.-EU trade deal is also promising.

It seems that the United States and Europe are planning to repair the old again. On October 30, local time, at the G20 leaders' summit in Rome, Italy, the US government and the European Union announced that they had reached an agreement to ease the trade dispute that began during the Trump administration.

On the same day, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said that according to the new agreement, the United States will continue to impose tariffs on EU steel and aluminum products, but will allow "a certain number" of EU steel and aluminum products to enter the US market duty-free, and the agreement stipulates that steel entering the United States from the EU must be "completely" produced in the EU. At the same time, the EU agreed to abandon the increase in retaliatory tariff rates.

Although the specific "quantity" has not been announced, according to a number of foreign media citing sources, according to the new agreement, EU countries can export about 3.3 million tons of steel to the United States duty-free every year.

On the same day, the European Commission's Executive Vice President Dombrovskis also announced on social media, and the EU and the United States have agreed to suspend the steel and aluminum trade dispute and start cooperation on sustainable steel and aluminum global arrangements. The specifics of the agreement will be officially announced by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and US President Joe Biden on October 31.

The dispute between the United States and Europe over steel and aluminum trade began in March 2018. Under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, then-US President Trump imposed tariffs of 25% and 10% respectively on imported steel and aluminum products on national security grounds. After negotiations, a handful of countries, including South Korea, Brazil and Argentina, subsequently agreed to impose quotas on steel or aluminum exports to the United States in exchange for additional tariff exemptions.

In contrast, the US-EU negotiations failed, so since June 1, 2018, the Trump administration began to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum products imported from the EU. On the 22nd of the same month, the European Union began implementing countermeasures, imposing tariffs on some imports from the United States, including iconic American products such as Harley motorcycles, Levi's jeans and bourbon, with a total value of 6.4 billion euros.

In May this year, the situation eased and Dombrovskis announced that the European Union would suspend further countermeasures against the steel and aluminum tariffs imposed by the United States and Canada, which provided space for further negotiations between Europe and the United States to resolve the trade dispute.

In fact, not only on the issue of steel and aluminum, but recently, the United States and Europe have also had room for maneuver in other trade disputes. On June 15, the United States and the European Union announced that they had ended the dispute over aircraft subsidies for Boeing and Airbus in Europe and reached a five-year truce.