With US and EU deals, Britain embarks on high-risk balancing act

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

56% : TORTUOUS POST-BREXIT NEGOTIATIONS Britain became an independent trading nation in 2020 after four years of tortuous negotiations following its vote to leave the EU.
55% : Advocates of Brexit had said it would free the country to strike trade deals with faster growing economies in Asia.
50% : Britain became the first country to get a reduction in U.S. tariffs when it announced a limited deal with Trump to lower levies on cars and steel, but it retained the baseline 10% U.S. tariff, despite having balanced trade with the United States.
49% : Marco Forgione, head of the Chartered Institute of Export & International Trade, said some of the 80,000 British businesses that export were already restructuring supply chains to ringfence high-risk sectors, including defence and AI. "They need a strategy that works with all major markets," he said, adding that an approach that deals with the EU, U.S. and China differently across sectors made sense, "but only if our partners see it as coherent and not opportunistic".
47% : The approach has tested the patience of the United States, China and the EU, three major trade powers that make up two-thirds of Britain's trade, and any limited economic benefits are likely to take time to emerge, analysts say. Martin Donnelly, formerly the chief civil servant in Britain's trade ministry, said there were no "easy or cheap wins" in the current environment and the government risked "being shut out by the three big trade blocs" if it gets the strategy wrong.
45% : One trade official, who has worked in London and Brussels, said Britain had extracted concessions from Trump that the U.S. president would be unwilling to give to Europe, and that it had also accepted a satellite status that would likely be anathema to Brussels.
35% : Janka Oertel, director of the Asia programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said that would have angered the EU, Japan and others that wanted a united front against Trump.

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