EU-US Trade and Technology Council Impact of the war in Ukraine and the way forward

Written by Marcin Szczepański.

The EU-US Trade and Technology Council (TTC) was formally launched during the EU-US Summit in June 2021 to intensify transatlantic cooperation, expand bilateral trade and investment, and reinforce the parties’ technological and industrial leadership. Another aim is to ensure that trade and technology serve society and economy while preserving shared values. The TTC has held two high-level political meetings, in September 2021 in Pittsburgh and in May 2022 in Paris-Saclay. These meetings steer cooperation within the TTC and guide its 10 working groups whose remit includes technology standards, secure supply chains, tech regulation, global trade challenges, climate and green technologies as well as investment screening and export controls.

Since its launch, the TTC has created a community of experts and policy-makers from both sides of the Atlantic who now regularly work together. Joint work in areas such as standards, integrity of information, supply chains, green public procurement and addressing non-market practices has yielded the TTC’s first successful steps. Moreover, Russia’s war on Ukraine is thought to have strengthened both the transatlantic relationship as a whole and the TTC, which has played a key role in ensuring swift and coordinated roll-out of export controls. After the war broke out, the TTC started supporting coordinated economic action to counter Russia’s autocratic attempts to also undermine the security of other nations. Yet, while the TTC has done well in areas related to war, some underline that it must deliver tangible results across all the work strands to increase its importance and impact.

So far, the TTC has focused mostly on information-sharing, joint mapping, risk identification and exploring options for closer cooperation in the future. Its success may well depend on the degree of alignment the parties can achieve across the policy areas and on whether they can move from joint identification of issues to elaborating common responses and solutions to them. The European Parliament supports the establishment and work of the TTC, while calling for a more democratic scrutiny over it. The next TTC meeting will take place before the end of 2022 in the United States.

Read the complete briefing on ‘EU-US Trade and Technology Council Impact of the war in Ukraine and the way forward‘ in the Think Tank pages of the European Parliament.