WASHINGTON: From Bush-era steel duties to the European Union’s “bra wars” skirmish with China, global trade wars have often threatened but never quite gotten off the ground and President Donald Trump’s planned steel and aluminum tariffs will likely play out the same way. The steel tariffs were ruled illegal by the World Trade Organization in 2003 and the 2005 spat over Chinese brassiere exports, dubbed a “storm in a D-Cup” by Britain’s media, was resolved in emergency talks between Brussels and Beijing. That is a pattern that could be repeated now, economists say. While Trump has talked tough on trade since taking office in January 2017, he has little to show so far from his aggressive rhetoric. He abandoned on his first day in office a 14-nation Pacific trade pact that stood no chance of passing Congress. Six months of talks to redraft the North American Free Trade Agreement have so far come to nothing despite frequent tweets that Trump would pull the trigger on the deal with Canada and Mexico that the president has dubbed a jobs killer. That leaves steel and aluminum tariffs, quotas and levies on washing machines and duties on solar cells – small areas of the overall U.S. economy and its trade. Investment bank Morgan Stanley calculates that taken together, steel, aluminum, washing machines and solar panels account for just 4.1 percent of U.S. imports. In terms of global trade, they are just 0.6 percent, the bank said. Trump himself has gone from saying that “trade wars are good, and easy to win” on Friday, to a more soothing “I don’t think you are going to have a trade war” by Monday. Prospects of a global trade war hit financial markets hard last week, although by Monday, stock markets had recovered their poise. “We don’t think that the most severe scenario, (a) protectionist push becomes the most likely one,” Morgan Stanley strategists Michael Zezas and Meredith Pickett said in a research note. So far, reaction has been muted, with the European Union saying it will target politically sensitive goods in response. Those include Harley Davidson motorcycles, made in Wisconsin, the home state of Republican House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan. Canada and Mexico, which would be among the countries hardest hit by Trump’s proposed tariffs, have both said they will respond with counter-measures if necessary. Inside the White House, there appeared to be room to modify the proposals, despite Trump’s tough talk. “The one thing that is very clear in this is that there is no language, there is no final language. There is no final plan,” said one outside Trump adviser, who spoke on condition of anonymity and said formal action was unlikely this week. “It’s far from settled, it’s far from done.” Published in Daily Times, March 7th 2018.