The Turnberry Agreement was named after a golf course in Scotland, which told you something about how it was made. Signed in the summer of 2025 after months of pressure from both sides, it set tariffs on most goods traded between the United States and the European Union at 15 percent — well below the 30 percent the administration had originally threatened, and the basis on which European businesses made plans for the rest of the year.
On May 1, President Trump posted on Truth Social that the EU was “not complying with our fully agreed to Trade Deal” and announced 25 percent tariffs on European automobiles, effective the following week. He offered no specifics about what the alleged noncompliance consisted of. The European Commission said the bloc remains “fully committed to a predictable, mutually beneficial transatlantic relationship” and rejected the claim that it had violated anything.
The announcement is not only a trade matter. It is a legal one. The Turnberry Agreement was built on the IEEPA tariff authority that the Supreme Court struck down in February. When the Court invalidated IEEPA as the basis for the original tariffs, it left the status of trade deals negotiated under that authority in legal limbo. A 15 percent cap written into a deal whose underlying legal mechanism has been ruled unconstitutional is not obviously enforceable — a point the administration has neither explained nor resolved.
What the announcement signals is that the administration is not treating the Turnberry Agreement as a binding constraint. Trump added in his post that companies producing cars and trucks in the United States would face no tariff at all, an implicit invitation for European manufacturers to relocate production — and a pressure tactic that European governments have seen before. VDA, the German auto industry association, urged both sides to honor the existing agreement. The German automobile industry is among the most exposed to this shift, and the timing compounds pressure on an EU economy already weakened by the effects of the Iran war on energy markets.
The episode is a compressed illustration of how American trade policy has operated in the second Trump term. Agreements are announced with considerable ceremony, treated as stabilizing facts for a period, and then renegotiated or simply departed from when the administration wants new leverage. European governments have learned to plan around this variability, which is itself a cost — the uncertainty suppresses investment and strains the political relationships that make cooperation on other matters possible.
What to watch: whether the EU invokes its anti-coercion instrument — the bloc prepared it for exactly this scenario — or whether it absorbs the pressure and seeks a quiet bilateral resolution. The EU has historically preferred negotiation to escalation. But the political cost of appearing to capitulate on a signed agreement is not zero, and elections in several member states make the calculation more complicated than it was a year ago.
American Life is independent analysis.
