Trump’s team takes its fight to a wary Europe

Senior administration officials are heading across the Atlantic to tackle points of tension including tech regulation, trade, military spending and Russia’s war in Ukraine. Leaders from the European Union and North Atlantic Treaty Organization will work to convince Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that the U.S. and Europe are more aligned than at odds. They have talking points ready on trade and defense.

Tech policy, though, poses a big and growing problem between the two giant economies because they are moving in diametrically opposite directions. Trump, Vance and congressional leaders, as well as big tech bosses including X owner Elon Musk and Meta Platforms Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, have harshly criticized EU tech regulations enacted over recent years.

Some of the bloc’s rules are aimed at the world’s biggest tech companies and social-media platforms, based on criteria such as European revenue and user numbers. While they don’t explicitly target the U.S., a majority of the companies that are large enough to meet the bloc’s thresholds are American.

“Europe has an ever-increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship, and making it difficult to build anything innovative there," Zuckerberg said last month. He said Meta would work with Trump “to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more."

Trump has referred to trade with Europe as an “atrocity" and said the U.S. should buy Greenland from Denmark, an idea the NATO ally rejects. He said Sunday that he plans to impose 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum imports and reciprocal tariffs for all U.S. imports, moves that—if implemented—could hurt European metals producers, automakers and other exporters.

His more targeted foreign-policy moves so far have largely focused on the Americas and the Middle East, though he pledged to turn soon to trade relations with Europe.

The trio of administration officials will hold the new team’s first in-person meeting with senior European leaders at an artificial-intelligence summit in Paris, NATO meetings in Brussels and an international-security conference in Munich. The Munich Security Conference, which starts Friday, will be dominated by the war in Ukraine, with Europe pushing for continued U.S. support for Kyiv. Trump has said he has started direct talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin about resolving the conflict.

EU leaders hope they will eventually be able to negotiate with Trump on defense and trade. He has berated Europe for insufficient military spending and pursuing trade policies that, he has said, exploit the U.S. Partly in response, European military spending is increasing and European leaders are seeking ways to shoulder more responsibility for their security, albeit more slowly than Trump wants.

The U.S. had a goods-trade deficit of $209 billion and a services-trade surplus of $77 billion with the EU in 2023, according to the Commerce Department. That left the U.S. with a deficit of $132 billion on an overall trade relationship that was worth about $1.4 trillion. EU leaders have discussed narrowing the gap by buying more U.S. liquefied natural gas and weaponry.

Tech is a fundamentally different issue from trade and defense because most of the world’s biggest digital-economy companies are American, and the government imposes light regulation on them. The EU has few large tech companies and has enacted some of the world’s most stringent regulations on the sector, including through a new law called the Digital Services Act that applies its toughest rules for the biggest tech companies.

That contrast has put U.S. tech champions on a collision course with Brussels. Now, U.S. tech leaders who were on frosty terms with the Biden administration have advocates in Washington.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), a Trump ally, last month wrote to the EU’s top tech regulator, Executive Vice President Henna Virkkunen, to “express our serious concerns with how the DSA’s censorship provisions affect free speech in the United States," in a letter reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

EU officials say the DSA doesn’t censor lawful content and was written to preserve freedom of expression. The biggest social-media companies are expected to show they are mitigating risks related to certain legal content in Europe, such as disinformation and harm to children, among other provisions.

Musk’s X was charged under the DSA last year and could face a fine of up to 6% of worldwide revenue under the law.

The EU has separately charged Apple and Meta with breaching a digital-competition law, the Digital Markets Act, in cases that could lead to fines of up to 10% of the companies’ worldwide revenue.

The bloc has previously issued hefty fines against Google, Apple and Meta for antitrust violations and last year won a court case that left Apple with a tax bill of more than $13 billion.

“They’re American companies, and they shouldn’t be doing that," Trump said during a video appearance last month at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “As far as I’m concerned it’s a form of taxation."

President Trump has said the U.S. should buy Greenland.

EU officials reject Trump’s characterization of its fines against tech companies. Antitrust probes are focused on potentially illegal behavior and harm, and are agnostic to where a company was established, a spokesman said.

Officials say U.S. pressure won’t upend continuing probes into U.S. tech companies.

“We don’t take decisions because of who has been democratically elected in other countries," said EU competition chief Teresa Ribera in a recent interview with the Journal. “We are bound by the rule of law."

EU technical teams investigating X, Meta, Apple and Google continue to work on those probes and have received no political direction to stop their work, a person familiar with the investigations said.

Trump has railed against European efforts to police big American tech companies in the past. During his first term, he referred to the bloc’s then-competition czar, Margrethe Vestager, as a “tax lady" who “really hates the U.S."

American officials and lawmakers have accused the EU of attempting to censor free speech through the DSA and some expressed outrage over an EU official’s letter to Musk last summer suggesting that X’s handling of a planned live discussion between Musk and Trump might violate the law.

Vance characterized the dispute as a matter of freedom of speech and suggested the U.S. could link it to support for NATO.

“What America should be saying is, if NATO wants us to continue supporting them and NATO wants us to continue to be a good participant in this military alliance, why don’t you respect American values and respect free speech?" Vance said in a YouTube interview before the November election. “European countries should theoretically share American values, especially about some very basic things like free speech."

EU officials said the DSA includes measures to safeguard free speech and increase transparency. For example, companies are required to offer users a way to contest a platform’s decision to suspend or restrict their accounts.

NATO funding will likely be on the agenda during the Trump team’s meetings.

Another tech clash looms on the horizon.

Trump last month withdrew U.S. support for a global tax agreement and directed agencies to investigate “discriminatory and extraterritorial" taxes in other jurisdictions.

France, Italy, the U.K. and other governments have levied digital-services taxes on some of the local revenue of large tech companies in recent years. They have previously said they would remove those taxes once a global agreement on taxing rights is in place.

Trump said in an executive order last month that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent should within 60 days present options for protective measures or other retaliation against countries with taxes that disproportionately affect American companies, setting up a possible confrontation with the EU and some of its member countries this spring.

EU officials have spent months preparing different options for responding to Trump’s tariff threats and other possible conflicts. They have said repeatedly that the bloc’s primary aim is to find a solution to Trump’s concerns about the U.S.-EU relationship through negotiations. But they insist the bloc is also prepared to hit back if it is targeted by U.S. tariffs.

A spokesman for the European Commission said Monday that it hadn’t received any official notification about additional tariffs on EU goods and wouldn’t respond without details or clarification.

“The EU sees no justification for the imposition of tariffs on its exports. We will react to protect the interests of European businesses, workers and consumers from unjustified measures," the spokesman said.

Write to Daniel Michaels at Dan.Michaels@wsj.com and Kim Mackrael at kim.mackrael@wsj.com.