The United States and the European Union on Thursday published much-anticipated details of the trade agreement they struck verbally last month, which will see Washington maintain high tariffs on European vehicles until the 27-nation bloc takes steps to lower its levies on many American industrial and agricultural products.
The terms, outlined in a joint statement released by two of the world’s largest and most intertwined economies, set a clearer framework for a truce announced in July that averted a damaging tit-for-tat escalation in President Trump’s punishing global trade war.
But that deal was a handshake arrangement, and negotiators have been scrambling ever since to put it into writing. European officials have been eager for a formal document, hoping that it would solidify promises that the administration had made to spare the bloc from worse outcomes. The newly published version is not a legally enforceable pact, but it is a step toward one.
Its backbone remains unchanged: The United States will maintain a 15 percent tariff on most goods arriving from E.U. member countries, a rate that Mr. Trump officially imposed in an executive order that took effect earlier this month.
In a win for Europe, that rate applies to some of its biggest exports, including pharmaceuticals, many of which will remain taxed at 15 percent even after the United States sets an expected set of tariffs for foreign-made medicines that could be as high as 200 percent.
Mr. Trump has looked to impose the duties on pharmaceuticals separately, and globally, on national security grounds, with additional tariffs planned for other critical sectors such as computer chips and lumber. But Europe will be spared from those higher rates as well, the two sides committed on Thursday.
Cars are more complicated. The United States will not immediately relax its tariffs on vehicles, currently set to 27.5 percent for European carmakers. Rather, the two sides agreed that the United States would lower those tariffs to 15 percent only after Europe took steps to follow through on its commitments to lower tariffs on imported American goods.
Specifically, the bloc must “formally” introduce legislation that would relax duties on industrial goods and agricultural products, including bison, tree nuts, dairy and many types of seafood, before lower car levies will kick in.
The delay could upset European automakers, which have faced steep financial losses for months as a result of America’s high car tariffs.
But a White House official, who briefed reporters in advance on the condition of anonymity, said Washington hoped this could be addressed in a matter of weeks, with tariffs lowered retroactively to the beginning of the month that the European Union is able to take action.
Maros Sefcovic, the bloc’s trade commissioner, said it bloc was determined to start the legislative process this month, so lower car tariffs will eventually be counted as having started on Aug. 1.
The release of the joint statement on Thursday is a critical step in what has been a weekslong back and forth between negotiators on both sides of the Atlantic, as European officials made a last-ditch effort to secure additional tariff relief, particularly on wine and spirits. In the end, they did not succeed, and taxes on those imports remain at 15 percent. Before this year, alcohol tariffs had generally been held at zero.
The written agreement acknowledges that the bare-bones deal is “a first step in a process that can be further expanded over time to cover additional areas.”
The statement was greeted warmly by officials in Europe. Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Union’s executive branch, the European Commission, praised it on social media as a move toward “stability in the largest trading partnership in the world.”
Economists said that the deal contained some positive provisions for U.S. businesses, but that the higher tariffs it enshrined would result in billions of dollars of additional costs for U.S. households.
Ryan Young, a senior economist at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank, said there was a good chance that the U.S. Supreme Court would strike down Mr. Trump’s global tariffs in the coming months, negating parts of the trade agreement.
“While everyone is hoping for some tariff stability, this deal probably won’t deliver it,” he said.
In many ways, the documents that the two governments produced evinced the even tougher haggling still on the horizon if they hope to strike a more formal trade deal, an undertaking usually years in the making. U.S. and European officials agreed to continue discussions on a vast array of thorny trade issues, including adjustments to auto and emissions standards and a reduction in regulations on U.S. technology companies, all of which have long rankled policymakers in Washington.
Europeans insist that they will not water down their key digital regulations, painting the issue as a matter of sovereignty. But the White House continues to push for them to weaken rules that govern online speech on big platforms in particular, criticizing the regulations for going too far to censor content and for causing undue burden to American technology companies.
Some industry groups praised the arrangement. The Computer & Communications Industry Association welcomed a commitment to “address longstanding trade issues” and urged both governments to continue removing digital trade barriers.
“While this framework is a promising development, the real work only begins now,” said Jonathan McHale, the group’s vice president for digital trade.
Before clinching their trade truce, the two sides appeared primed for a devastating standoff, with Mr. Trump threatening tariffs on Europe of 30 percent, and the regional bloc considering a set of retaliatory measures, which the White House had promised to combat in kind.
They reached their deal partly because European emissaries appealed to Mr. Trump with promises of significant new U.S. investments, adopting a tactic that other countries have also used to lessen the blow of U.S. tariffs. Under the deal, Europe agreed to purchase $750 billion in American energy, while increasing its investment in the United States by more than $600 billion.
It quickly became clear that officials in Brussels saw the commitments more as aspirations than as hard targets, given the fact that they would come from private sources that were not controlled by the European Commission. On Thursday, U.S. and E.U. officials appeared to acknowledge as much in their joint statement, which did not include further details on the investments or the way in which Washington might enforce the terms.
Still, the European Union was forced to make other important concessions to the United States to secure the deal. The agreement has been widely criticized in Europe for its potential costs.
And rhetorically, E.U. officials have been forced to echo Mr. Trump’s assertion that the agreement will make the global trading system more fair. They had long held that it was not unfair to begin with.
Ana Swanson contributed reporting from Washington.
