The European Commission is expected to disclose this week the tariffs it plans to impose on Chinese electric vehicles (EVs) due to what it says are excessive subsidies. This move follows Washington’s recent decision to quadruple duties for Chinese EVs to 100%, although Brussels is expected to set significantly lower tariffs.

One thing to understand about the EU is that it was built to avoid policies like this. If we set agricultural policy aside, the EU is built to avoid free trade restrictions and combat unfair state subsidies. Furthermore, the EU has very little history of engaging in active industrial policy on a global competitive scale, so to enforce such tariffs sits very poorly with the EU bureaucracy. They are simply not used to this line of thinking or this type of policy development.

That’s why the EU has taken a characteristically bureaucratic approach to waging trade war. The tariffs are obviously tied to some sort of meticulous calculation of how much the individual company gains from Chinese state subsidies and each company can make their case for why they should be exempted or gain discounts. The EU is trying to wage trade wars in a transparent and rational way, which is perhaps the most on character thing ever.

Meanwhile, the Chinese are waging a more classical trade war of trying to replicate the EU’s tariffs. This means that China is reportedly looking at the agricultural sector, where the EU has been engaged in active industrial policy and state subsidies for decades. In my view, that’s a very reciprocal response (or “tit for tat”) since it basically stays within the same technocratic and legal logic as the European EV tariffs.