Can the EU and NATO impose tariffs on India and China, as Trump wants?

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US President Donald Trump has called on NATO and EU member states to hit China and India with tariffs of up to 100 percent to force Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the war in Ukraine.

Trump, who previously pledged to end the conflict on “day one” of becoming president, made his demand during a meeting between United States and European Union officials last Tuesday. The move is seen as a way to try to expedite a peace deal between Moscow and Kyiv.

Why is Trump making the request?

China and India buy Russia’s oil, which is helping to keep the Russian economy afloat.

As the largest buyer of Russian energy, China imported 109 million tonnes of crude oil last year, representing nearly 20 percent of its total energy imports, according to Chinese customs data. India, by contrast, imported 88 million tonnes of Russian oil in 2024, or 15 percent of its imports.

And while Trump recently slapped an extra 25 percent tariff on India for importing Russian crude, he has so far refrained from imposing similar tariffs on China as his administration navigates a delicate trade truce with Beijing.

To sidestep the issue, Trump on Saturday asked NATO to impose 50-100 percent tariffs on China to weaken Beijing’s economic grip over Russia.

In the letter Trump posted on Saturday, he claimed the halt on Russian energy purchases, combined with heavy tariffs on China, would be of “great help” in ending the conflict.

Europe’s reliance on Russian energy has fallen since the start of Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. At the time, the EU imported 45 percent of its natural gas from Russia. That is expected to fall to just 13 percent this year. But Trump wants Europe to do more.

The US president’s requests come amid heightened tensions between NATO and Russia. More than a dozen Russian drones entered Polish airspace last Wednesday, and one entered Romanian airspace on Saturday. Poland and Romania are both members of NATO.

Warsaw said the drone incursion was deliberate, but Moscow downplayed the incident and said it had “no plans to target” Poland. Bucharest, meanwhile, scrambled fighter jets to intercept the Russian drone on Saturday evening and has denounced Moscow’s “irresponsible actions”.

France and Germany have notably joined a new NATO mission to bolster the group’s eastern flank and will move some military assets eastwards.

In a Fox News interview last Friday, Trump said his patience with Putin was beginning to run out following recent face-to-face talks in Alaska and amid Russia’s increasing aerial attacks on Ukraine, including its largest-ever air attack earlier this month.

The US president expressed frustration with Putin’s failure to halt the war and said he is considering additional sanctions on Russian banks and energy products.

“We’re going to have to come down very, very strong,” Trump said.

Trump’s push for allied tariffs against China and Russia comes at a time when his own legal authority to impose tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) is being challenged at home. In May, a US trade court ruled that the tariffs “exceed any authority granted to the president”. An appeals court upheld that ruling in August, and the case is now headed to the Supreme Court.

A decision over the legality of Trump’s tariffs is expected in November.

Can the EU easily impose sanctions on China and India?

The bilateral trade in goods between Brussels and Beijing reached approximately 732 billion euros ($860bn) in 2024. The EU ran a trade deficit in goods with China of around 305.8 billion euros ($359bn) last year, up from about 297 billion euros ($349bn) in 2023, making China the EU’s largest import partner.

For context, the US remains Europe’s largest trading partner. In 2024, the total trade in goods and services between the EU and the US amounted to 1.68 trillion euros ($1.98 trillion). Here, the EU had a goods trade surplus of 198 billion euros ($233bn), and an overall surplus of 50 billion euros ($59bn).

The bulk of Europe’s imports from China – roughly 40 percent – come in the form of consumer electronics, followed by heavy manufacturing equipment and then clothing and accessories.

European goods imports from India, comparatively, are small. In 2024, the EU ran a goods trade deficit – mostly in the form of electronic equipment, pharmaceuticals and base metals like iron and steel – of just 22.5 billion euros ($26bn) with India.

The upshot is that Europe is highly dependent on goods imported from China — and much less so on India. Chinese manufacturing imports are deeply integrated into European supply chains.

Suddenly imposing tariffs, particularly at levels of 50-100 percent, would disrupt manufacturing, increase production costs and raise consumer prices across the EU, which is why the bloc will likely be wary of adopting unilateral punitive tariffs.

Still, some EU member states have publicly backed targeted measures against China. On September 12, finance ministers from the Group of Seven (G7) bloc of nations – which includes France, Germany and Italy – convened a call to discuss additional sanctions on Russia and possible tariffs on countries they see as “enabling” the war in Ukraine.

At the same time, Turkiye, which is a NATO member, is the third-largest buyer of Russia’s oil products, after China and India. Other NATO members that purchase Russian oil include Hungary and Slovakia.

What will happen next?

Within hours of Trump’s September 13 pronouncement to NATO members, Beijing responded by saying that China does not participate in wars or help to plot them.

Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, said that war cannot solve problems and sanctions only complicate them, according to a statement from China’s Foreign Affairs Ministry.

US Treasury Secretary Bessent will meet with China’s Vice Premier He Lifeng in Madrid on Monday to try to de-escalate trade tensions between the world’s two largest economies.

As for US-India relations, Trump said on September 9 that the two countries were “continuing negotiations to address the trade barriers” between them.

He plans to speak to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the coming weeks and expects a “successful conclusion” to their trade talks, he wrote on social media.

In response, Modi echoed Trump’s optimism that the talks would be successful and said the two countries were “close friends and natural partners”.

“Our teams are working to conclude these discussions at the earliest,” Modi said. “I am also looking forward to speaking with President Trump.”

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