BRUSSELS — Donald Trump had
a simple warning for Europe: Buy more American gas or I’ll hit you with crippling tariffs. Great, Europe said. Let’s talk.
Then Trump imposed the tariffs anyway.
In reality, the talks never really even got off the ground. According to four EU officials and diplomats with knowledge of the situation, negotiators were regularly confused and frustrated when they tried to take the U.S. president up on his energy offer, often hitting a wall of bureaucracy and disinterest in Washington.
Now the American leader is set to impose sweeping, across-the-board trade barriers on Wednesday as part of a self-declared “Liberation Day.” It was a moment Europe had hoped to avoid, proactively suggesting all sorts of goodies to placate Trump and avoid an economic maelstrom.
High on the list was buying more American liquefied natural gas (LNG). It was
the first thing that Ursula von der Leyen, who runs the EU’s executive arm, suggested following Trump’s election.
The offer seemed logical. Since Russia rolled its tanks into Ukraine in 2022, the EU has bought up more and more U.S. LNG — nearly tripling its imports to help replace Moscow's energy. Monthly consumption even hit a record high last month after Trump entered office.
Europe was doing what Trump said he wanted: buying more American LNG. Officials hoped that could help appease him and escape tariffs. After all, in Trump’s first term, Europe had cooled trade hostilities with pledges to buy more soybeans and LNG.
This time, though, things were different. A more unrestrained Trump is on a crusade to remodel the economic order — for now, that is.
The big lesson was that pandering to Trump's demands simply doesn't work.
The Room Where It Didn’t Happen
In the weeks after Trump’s election, the EU offered to launch talks over energy purchases, and von der Leyen convened a team of officials to sort through the logistics.
“The priority is to have a conversation, to engage early, discuss common interests and then be ready to negotiate,” a European Commission spokesperson said the day after Trump was sworn in.
American LNG had also been central for von der Leyen’s predecessor, Jean-Claude Juncker. In 2018 the Commission president convinced Trump
to pause planned tariffs with, among other things, a promise to boost U.S. LNG purchases and build more terminals to import American gas.
After Trump was elected a second time, he said Europe must go even further.
The EU, the Republican said in December, must “make up their tremendous deficit with the U.S. by the large scale purchase of our oil and gas. Otherwise, it is tariffs all the way.” (The EU and U.S. actually have a relatively balanced trade relationship when accounting for both goods and services).
But the diplomats, granted anonymity to discuss the private talks, said they struggled to find a path through the personnel changes and shifting power dynamics inside the new administration.
“We are trying to identify who are the key people in the U.S. administration; you need to understand who can actually deliver — some … may not be what their titles say,” said one of those envoys in March, complaining that key roles in the White House and the State Department responsible for dealing with Europe had remained unfilled weeks after the inauguration.
Complicating the matter further, the diplomat said, the Trump administration preferred to communicate directly with individual EU capitals, even though Brussels plays a pivotal role in trade policy for its 27 members.
“Trump sees the EU as the only thing between him and subjugating individual countries to his will,” the diplomat said. “So the main bridge for us has been national capitals. France, Germany, Italy — they are very well connected and these are the channels we have been forced to use.”
Two officials from EU countries said they had expressed a willingness to buy more American LNG to Washington, but that the U.S. had offered no clarity about how a deal would work or what Europe would get in return.
Fossil fuel fury
In addition to the diplomatic obstacles abroad, there have been challenges back home. Many EU countries are already heavily dependent on American gas, and increasing imports would present more hurdles.
“There is not much more we can do,” outgoing German Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck said in January, noting that 90 percent of his country’s LNG already came from U.S. sources.
Some climate-conscious countries
warned Brussels that any fossil fuel deal with the U.S. would only harm EU efforts to save the planet.
EU countries should “concentrate on getting rid of fossil [fuels] and not find new markets where to buy,” Finnish Energy and Environment Minister Kai Mykkänen told POLITICO in January.
Still, the Commission plowed ahead. In February the EU executive released a plan to lower the high energy prices weighing down local companies. The strategy included
an offer to back longer-term contracts with American LNG exporters — even raising the possibility of indirectly backing investments in U.S. gas infrastructure to get better access.
That riled green groups, who argued such moves would lock the bloc into fossil fuels for decades and hamper the planned switch to renewables.
Behind the headlines
Unproductive high-level talks aside, market forces are already driving the EU and the U.S. closer together on energy.
“Europe will likely buy more LNG from the U.S. this year, not due to geopolitics, but due to the continent’s need to restock inventories ahead of next winter and because more U.S. LNG supply is coming online this year,” said Laura Page, head of gas analytics at intelligence firm Kpler.
According to the company’s latest data, the EU is facing a gas supply shortfall and will end the winter with its tanks only a third full. That’s because of “a cold and windless winter coupled with a supply shock from Russia at the start of the year,” when
a major transit pact that allowed Moscow to ship supplies to Europe via Ukraine expired.
That has put Washington in a prime position to cash in. New LNG plants at Plaquemines in Louisiana and Corpus Christi in Texas, which were completed under the previous administration, have also ensured there’s enough capacity to meet the demand.
Kpler data shows American gas imports have risen sharply in recent years, hitting a record of 5.59 million metric tons in March this year.
"The question is how seriously can we take Trump's plans for tariffs," said Ajay Parmar, an analyst with commodities intelligence firm ICIS. "As with everything, these moves can always be seen as the real start of negotiations, not the end."
But for now, at least, Trump doesn’t seem keen to listen much on energy, leaving Europe facing economic upheaval and wondering what, if anything, might work.
