The European Parliament on Tuesday gave its final assent to the tariff agreement struck last summer between Brussels and the Trump administration, clearing the last major political obstacle to a deal that has tested transatlantic nerves for nearly a year. Meeting in Strasbourg, lawmakers voted 440 to 151, with 50 abstentions, to eliminate EU customs duties on all US industrial goods and to grant preferential market access to a range of American seafood and agricultural products. A second regulation, extending duty-free treatment for US lobster imports, passed by a similarly wide margin. The votes fulfil the European side of a bargain reached at President Donald Trump’s Scottish golf resort in July 2025, under which Washington capped its levies on most EU exports at 15 percent. The EU Council is now expected to provide formal endorsement before a 4 July deadline set by Trump, who had threatened “much higher” tariffs if the bloc failed to act.

Viewed from Washington, the sequence represents a vindication of Trump’s coercive trade diplomacy: a threat-laden ultimatum that compelled the world’s largest trading bloc to dismantle its industrial tariffs. Yet the almost eleven-month delay tells a more complicated story. European lawmakers repeatedly postponed the vote, unsettled first by Trump’s menacing rhetoric towards Greenland and then by a US Supreme Court ruling that struck down several of his tariff orders, throwing the legal basis of the American concessions into doubt. The hesitation infuriated the White House but gave the Parliament time to reshape what many in Brussels regarded as an excessively one-sided framework.

The safeguards inserted by the Parliament’s trade committee, led by German Social Democrat Bernd Lange, are the defining feature of the final text. A sunset clause will extinguish the tariff preferences on 31 December 2029 unless both sides agree to extend them, a date that conveniently aligns with the next US presidential term. A suspension mechanism allows the EU to snap back duties if Washington breaches the agreement—for instance, by raising tariffs again. The legislation also stipulates that the United States must reduce tariffs on washing machines and certain steel-containing products to a maximum of 15 percent by the end of this year; failure to do so will trigger a review of EU countermeasures. “Our determination has paid off,” Lange declared, arguing that the Parliament had secured a more robust deal than the one originally negotiated by the European Commission.

Analysts in London and Berlin describe the outcome as a temporary truce rather than a durable settlement. European industry, particularly Germany’s automotive and machinery sectors, will benefit from the immediate removal of US duties on their exports, but the conditional nature of the deal leaves supply chains exposed to sudden political reversals. In Paris and Rome, officials privately acknowledge that the accord buys time without resolving the underlying volatility of Trump’s trade policy. The agreement does not address the digital services taxes, regulatory disputes, or steel and aluminium overcapacity that continue to generate friction. From Moscow, state media have noted the vote with an air of detachment, framing it as evidence that even the EU must eventually bend to American pressure.

The coming days will see the formalities completed and the tariff cuts take effect. Yet the clock is already ticking towards the 2029 expiry, and the suspension clause is a loaded weapon that either side could brandish. The broader question is whether this managed trade peace can survive the next eruption of Trump’s transactional diplomacy—or whether it merely postpones a more chaotic rupture in the world’s largest commercial relationship.