President Trump says he is outraged by the fact that the United States imports more goods than it sends to the rest of the world. What he rarely mentions, though, is that when it comes to services, the tables are turned.
Service sectors — which include the finance, travel, engineering and medical industries and more — make up the bulk of the American economy. Exports of these services brought more than $1 trillion into the United States last year.
But that dominance also gives other countries some clout in negotiations — including the ability to impose some pain on the U.S. economy as they look to retaliate against Mr. Trump’s tariffs on goods.
The European Union, for instance, could use tools designed to restrict services coming into the bloc as a cudgel.
“The real leverage that the Europeans have is ultimately on the services side,” said Mujtaba Rahman, managing director for Europe at the Eurasia Group, a political research firm. “It will escalate before it de-escalates.”
The United States is the largest exporter of services in the world, and a large share of those services, from financial services to cloud computing, are delivered digitally. The country ran a trade surplus in services of nearly $300 billion last year.
Every time a European tourist stays at a U.S. hotel, for example, the money spent is counted in the services export basket. And every time someone in Canada or Japan or Mexico pays to listen to music or watch movies and television shows made in the United States, they are adding to America’s surplus in the services trade.
Many of the countries that the United States is targeting for tariffs run a services deficit with the United States, including Canada, China, Japan, Mexico and much of Europe, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
“The E.U. is now equipped with policy tools to extend the range of retaliation against U.S. tariffs to target imports of U.S. services,” Filippo Taddei, a managing director of global investment research at Goldman Sachs, wrote in a research note about possible European responses.
Arguably the most extreme option is known as the Anti-Coercion Instrument. First proposed in 2021, the tool is largely untested, but it allows the European Union to hit a trading partner with a “wide range of possible countermeasures.”
Such measures could include tariffs, restrictions on trade in services and limits on trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights. That could affect American tech giants like Google. Several European diplomats said that use of the tool is a distinct possibility, should the trade war escalate.
While possible restrictions aimed at services would be a new trade war response, Brussels has a history of penalizing the U.S. tech industry for other reasons. For more than a decade, the European Union has gone after Silicon Valley’s biggest companies for anticompetitive business practices, weak data privacy protections and lax content moderation policies.
Europe’s aggressive oversight has led to notable products changes because the European Union, home to about 450 million people, is a major market. Google has changed the way it displays search results, Apple has tweaked its App Store, and Meta has made adjustments to Instagram and Facebook because of E.U. rules.
Taking aim at the tech industry would intensify a feud with the Trump administration over European tech regulation. Even before the tariff standoff, senior officials including Vice President JD Vance have criticized the European Union for what they view as excessive regulation of American tech companies.
As soon as this week, the European Union was expected to announce new fines against Apple and Meta for violating the Digital Markets Act, a law passed in 2022 intended to make it easier for smaller companies to compete against tech giants. Meta and X are under investigation under another new law, called the Digital Services Act, that requires companies to do more to police their platforms for illicit content.
Britain, on the other hand, may use its rules over service imports as a carrot instead of a stick.
For weeks, British officials have tried to reassure the public that it was in a strong position to negotiate with the Trump administration to avoid tariffs, repeatedly pointing to the relatively balanced goods trade between the two countries. (Britain has a surplus when it comes to services.)
Still, one sore point for Trump administration officials has been Britain’s digital services tax, which they say unfairly harms American tech giants. The tax was introduced in 2020 as a 2 percent levy on revenues of search engines, social media services and online marketplaces. It is expected to raise the equivalent of more than $1 billion for the British treasury this fiscal year.
British officials said changes in this are part of negotiations with the Trump administration. Last month, Rachel Reeves, the chancellor of the Exchequer said, “We’ve got to get the balance right.”
Britain has sought to position itself in a “Goldilocks zone” between the United States and European Union, according to researchers at Chatham House, a research institute, maintaining good relationships with both and keeping some regulation.
If scrapping the digital services tax brings about “a sweetheart deal for the U.K. that avoids the worst of U.S. tariffs, it might prove a masterstroke,” wrote the researchers, Alex Krasodomski and Olivia O’Sullivan. “But that is highly uncertain — the president’s application of tariffs has been in constant flux.”
It was more likely that Britain would eventually have to pick a closer allegiance to either the United States or the European Union, they added.