EU trade chief Maros Sefcovic said Thursday that reciprocity in tariffs should be made to work for both the bloc and Washington, after talks with his counterparts in US President Donald Trump's administration.

Including VAT s in reciprocity would lead to hefty increases in tariffs. Goldman Sachs, a bank, says that if America adopted only mirror-image tariffs without retaliation, its levies would rise by an average of two percentage points. Many European vat rates exceed 20%.

The president’s plan for reciprocal tariffs sounds good in theory. But there was a reason the United States abandoned the approach a century ago. The gains would be few and the costs enormous.