EU Calls for Peace among US, China and Russia to Ease Global Tensions

The European Union on Monday urged the United States, China and Russia to work together to ease worsening global trade tensions, warning that they could otherwise spiral into “conflict and chaos”.

The comments from EU Council President Donald Tusk come as Washington and Beijing stand on the brink of a trade war which many fear could hammer the global economy, while the US has also picked fights with allies in Europe and Canada.

“It is the common duty of Europe and China, but also America and Russia, not to destroy (the global trade order) but to improve it, not to start trade wars which turned into hot conflicts so often in our history,” Tusk said in Beijing.

“There is still time to prevent conflict and chaos.”

Tusk spoke at an annual EU-China summit held Monday against the backdrop of the deepening trade discord.

The EU — the world’s biggest single market with 28 countries and 500 million people — is trying to buttress alliances in the face of the protectionism unleashed by US President Donald Trump’s “America First” administration.

The meeting between Chinese and European officials in Beijing, which also included European Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker, came as Trump prepared to hold talks in Helsinki with Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

Trump fuelled the rising rancour in a interview aired Sunday in which he labelled the EU, Russia and China as “foes” of the United States.

– ‘Multilateralism under attack’ –

Tusk said the world needs trade reform and not confrontation.

“This is why I am calling on our Chinese hosts, but also on Presidents Trump and Putin, to jointly start this process from a thorough reform of the WTO (World Trade Organization),” Tusk said, without specifying the reforms.

“Today we are facing a dilemma: whether to play a tough game, such as tariff wars and conflict in places like Ukraine and Syria, or to look for common solutions based on fair rules,” Tusk said.

In a meeting later with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Juncker said that “multilateralism is under attack, an attack unprecedented since the end of World War II.”

“We cannot accept that through unilateral attacks, the multilateral system should be damaged,” he said, also stressing the need for WTO reform.

French President Emmanuel Macron had called in late May for talks on overhauling the WTO at a time when European companies were bracing for punishing US tariffs on steel and aluminium imports that ultimately went into effect on June 1.

Besides the steel and aluminium tariffs on the EU, Russia and major US trading partners, Trump earlier this month implemented tariffs on $34 billion worth of Chinese imports, drawing a tit-for-tat response from Beijing.

Washington last week threatened yet more measures on another $200 billion in Chinese goods.

Beijing has said it would retaliate for that, and on Monday the Commerce Ministry said it had added the $200 billion tariff threat to existing WTO complaints which it has lodged against Washington.

The back-and-forth has heightened fears that trading powers will hunker down into a destructive all-out trade war that could hit global growth.

China said on Monday that its economic growth rate had slowed slightly to 6.7 percent in the second quarter of this year, from 6.8 percent the previous quarter, and a government spokesman warned that a trade conflict threatens all the countries concerned.

“The China-US trade friction unilaterally provoked by the United States will have an impact on the Chinese and US economies,” said Mao Shengyong, a spokesman for the national statistics bureau.

“Now that the world economy is deeply integrated, industrial chains have become globalised, and many related countries also will feel an impact.”