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Translated by: Flutura Gashi-Mehmeti
- March 18 2025 17: 37
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Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni warned European partners on Tuesday against escalating trade disputes with the United States through retaliatory tariffs and urged Western allies to continue their long-standing cooperation.
Meloni, who is close to US President Donald Trump, has said that established ties between Europe and the United States must be preserved and that the EU should distance itself from any suggestion that its countries need to create an independent security umbrella, Reuters reports.
"It is a simple fact of reality that it is not possible to envisage a sustainable security guarantee by separating Europe and the United States," she told parliament ahead of a summit of EU leaders later this week.
Trump has upended relations between Washington and its allies, freezing the flow of American arms to Ukraine to force Kiev to make peace with Russia. He has also begun imposing steep tariffs on European steel and aluminum, complaining about the US goods trade deficit with the EU.
The European Union has said it will impose tariffs on 26 billion euros worth of US goods from next month. However, Meloni questioned the wisdom of the move and said Italy wanted a negotiated deal with Washington.
"I'm not sure that responding to tariffs with more tariffs is necessarily a good deal," she said.
"For this reason, I believe that Italy's efforts should be directed towards seeking common-sense solutions between the United States and Europe, guided more by logic than by instinct," she added.
Meloni has developed strong ties with Trump and was the only European leader present at his presidential inauguration in January.
Fearing they can no longer rely on US military support, Britain and France have led efforts to prepare a largely European peacekeeping force for Ukraine in the event of a peace deal between Kiev and Moscow.
But Meloni has expressed doubts about the plan and ruled out any Italian participation.
"The deployment of Italian troops in Ukraine has never been on the agenda, just as we believe that the deployment of European troops proposed by France and the United Kingdom is a very complex, dangerous and ineffective option," she said.
