European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said on Friday that Washington's new tariffs on European goods were based on allegations about forced labour controls that she called unfounded. Speaking on the sidelines of ASEAN meetings in Manila, she said: "You can't say that for the European Union." The exchange lays out the usual choreography of transatlantic power: officials in Brussels and Washington arguing over trade discipline while workers, producers and consumers absorb the costs.
Kallas pushed back against the Trump administration's move to impose new tariffs of 10% and 12.5% on goods from 60 trading partners, including the European Union, over allegations of lax enforcement of forced labour bans. The tariffs came just as a temporary 10% global tariff expired. The machinery of state and capital keeps moving, and the people at the bottom get the bill.
"If you compare our labour laws to the ones of the United States, I mean, we have paid vacations, we have very good labour conditions for our employees, so it's not really grounded," Kallas said. The line is meant to defend the bloc's labour standards, but it also shows how the EU sells itself as a civilised market order while remaining a structure built to manage labour, competition and trade on behalf of those who already hold power.
Asked whether the EU had expected to be included in the U.S. action, Kallas replied: "Who can keep track of the tariffs going on and off? No, we were not expecting this." That uncertainty is the real language of the market order. Deals are made, broken and reworked by governments and presidents, while everyone else is left to follow the shifting rules.
The Brussels Apparatus Meets the Tariff Machine
The Trump administration's tariffs are the latest effort to restore President Donald Trump's campaign vision of a near-global tariff after the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year struck down the "reciprocal" tariffs he imposed under emergency powers in a bid to shrink the U.S. trade deficit. That detail matters. The tariff regime is not some accidental glitch. It is state power using emergency powers, courts and trade policy to discipline markets and workers across borders.
Kallas said the EU will seek clarification from Washington and added that the bloc had honoured commitments under a transatlantic trade agreement reached last year. "We had a deal with America and we have kept to that deal, that side of the deal," she said. "That's why this is a negative surprise that this agreement is not kept." The language of deals and commitments is the language of the single market and its transatlantic cousins: rules for trade, not for people, enforced by institutions that answer upward, not outward.
Sanctions as Another Form of State Violence
Kallas also said the European Union's latest sanctions package against Russia was aimed at putting more pressure on Moscow and limiting its ability to finance the war in Ukraine. "It is to deprive them of the financing of this war," she said. The EU approved its 21st sanctions package against Russia on Thursday, imposing curbs on the country's banking sector and cryptocurrency networks, the Council of the EU said.
Kallas said sanctions were having an effect on Russia's economy and have made it harder for Moscow to raise capital abroad. "We also see that due to the sanctions, they can't raise capital outside," she said. "It is clear that if we put this in place, it has an effect together with other elements." Sanctions are presented as clean instruments, but they are still coercion. They are economic siege by another name, wielded by states that claim moral authority while tightening the screws through finance, banking and access to capital.
She said sanctions were only one element of a broader European strategy to pressure Russia into serious negotiations with Ukraine. "We have different elements of this approach. The sanctions are just one of them," she said. "We are looking at what more we can do to pressure Russia to actually sit around the negotiation table and negotiate with Ukraine." The negotiation table, like the tariff table, is reserved for states. Everyone else is expected to live with the consequences.
The same Brussels apparatus that talks about labour standards, trade agreements and pressure campaigns keeps expanding its reach through sanctions, tariffs and market rules. It calls that governance. The people who live under it call it something else when the bills arrive.