Sabine Weyand

The reelection of Donald Trump in the United States means that a global trade war is all but inevitable, but when the declarations of tariffs and trade embargoes begin, the European Union will have a secret weapon at its disposal: Sabine Weyand.

The director general of the European Commission’s trade department is a technical wizard who is infamously brusque. Often compared to a bulldozer, Weyand’s take-no-prisoners approach was key when she served as one of the bloc’s lead negotiators in the Brexit talks. The United Kingdom was undoubtedly the big loser in the resulting agreement, which helped cement the civil servant’s reputation as one of the foremost defenders of the EU’s commercial interests.

The 60-year-old German has literally spent half her life working for the Commission, where her trademark bob and designer glasses elicit a combination of fear and respect among colleagues and adversaries. A decade ago, she was a major player in the design of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, a scheme that would have resulted in the largest bilateral trade initiative ever — if Trump had not scuppered the negotiations after moving into the White House.

The EU’s top trade official since 2019, Weyand tangoed with the first Trump administration and oversaw the bloc’s response to his steel and aluminum tariffs. Brussels’ retaliatory measures — which included added levies on classic American products like Harley-Davidson motorcycles, bourbon and sweet corn — were widely seen as an effective response to Washington’s provocations.

But now Trump is back, and his team is boasting that it intends to roll out massive new tariffs on imports that will go far beyond anything seen during the president-elect’s first term. Alarm bells are ringing in Brussels, but EU officials insist that they have been preparing for the new policies and that there are contingency plans to counter the “America First” measures.

Weyand’s expertise will be pivotal to the execution of those plans. After five years at her post, the civil servant would normally be preparing to move on to another department. When that ultimately happens, the unstable geopolitical landscape is such that she can count on being placed in yet another role in which she’ll be asked to help keep the EU’s partners and adversaries in check.