The number that governs the current détente is 15. The United States has struck deals with the European Union and Japan that limit U.S. tariffs on most imports from those places to a maximum of 15%, a ceiling presented as both concession and constraint. It is also the number Washington now insists it will respect.
That assurance comes with a qualifier that sits uncomfortably inside it. The United States will respect the tariff caps in trade deals struck with the European Union, Japan and others, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said in Paris, adding that new tariffs tied to forced labour provide the legal basis to stay within those commitments. The language is careful. It signals compliance while opening a route around the limit.
Compliance is asserted even as the mechanism to bypass it is constructed
The route is already in use. Greer’s office unveiled a new set of tariffs on multiple countries after determining that they failed to curb trade in goods made with forced labour. The justification is not economic imbalance but conduct. That distinction matters because it shifts tariffs from negotiated limits to enforceable remedies, turning what looks like a ceiling into a floor with exceptions.
Those exceptions are not theoretical. The EU would face a 10% tariff and Japan 12.5% under the new measures—comfortably inside the agreed cap. But the structure holding those numbers in place is explicitly provisional. A further investigation into excess manufacturing capacity could see overall tariffs on the two economies’ goods push well past 15%. The ceiling holds until it doesn’t, and the trigger sits inside Washington’s investigative process.
That process exists because an earlier one failed. The U.S. launched the Section 301 investigations to rebuild Trump’s emergency tariffs, which were struck down by a U.S. Supreme Court decision in February. The court removed the old scaffolding; the administration is rebuilding it with new legal language. The difference is not the objective but the mechanism used to reach it.
Old constraints fall away as new legal pathways replicate their effects
Greer does not hide the tension. Washington would “marry up” the findings from its investigations against some of the agreements, he said, describing an effort to align enforcement with commitments that were supposed to limit it. In the same breath, he insists the deals still bind. “We understand that a deal is a deal,” he told reporters. The statement lands as reassurance. It reads as a constraint the administration is already testing.
The pressure comes from a wider tariff landscape that no longer resembles a system of negotiated limits. Average U.S. tariffs on Chinese exports now stand at 47.5 percent and cover 100 percent of all goods, a level reached after U.S. tariffs have risen by 26.8 percentage points since the second Trump administration began on January 20, 2025. China has responded in kind, lifting its own tariffs. The bilateral channel is effectively sealed; trade flows have already started to reroute.
They are not disappearing. Empirical results from a gravity model confirm that some of China’s exports to the United States were redirected to the euro area. The goods still move; they just land somewhere else. The EU’s relative insulation—it faces the fourth lowest effective tariff rate among major U.S. trading partners—has made it a recipient of that diversion. What looks like preferential access is partly a byproduct of pressure applied elsewhere.
Trade flows adapt faster than the rules that claim to govern them
That position now carries its own risk. The EU’s advantage depends on two assumptions holding at once: that U.S. tariff caps remain binding, and that diversion continues to flow in its direction. Both sit inside the same investigative machinery Washington is expanding. The administration has been explicit about its concern. It has been very clear from the outset that it was concerned with forced labour and a failure of countries to take effective action. That framing allows the United States to treat partners and rivals through the same lens, differing only in degree.
The consequence is a system where compliance is judged in Washington and enforced through instruments designed to sit alongside agreements rather than beneath them. The language of partnership remains intact; the mechanism of enforcement does not defer to it. Each investigation becomes a lever that can reset the terms without reopening the deal.
The unresolved condition is not whether the United States will break its agreements. It is whether those agreements still define the limits of its tariff policy. If tariffs can rise beyond 15% through findings that sit outside the deal but claim consistency with it, the cap ceases to function as a boundary. It becomes a reference point.
The EU and Japan are left holding contracts that guarantee access up to a number Washington has already shown it can move past without formally breaching. The legal architecture allows it; the investigative process supplies the justification; the trade flows have already adjusted to a world where ceilings are conditional. The 15% cap still exists on paper, but the authority that can lift it sits in the same system that claims to enforce it.
