The beginning of 2026 was marked by the world-famous speech of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney on the fading of the rule-based international order and the emergence of an era in which the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must. From a European perspective, similar concerns have been raised following the latest developments regarding tariffs threatened by the US in response to the deployment of a small contingent of EU troops for the preventive protection of Greenland. French President Emmanuel Macron noted that “Europe has very strong tools now, and we have to use them when we are not respected (…) The anti-coercion mechanism is a powerful instrument and we should not hesitate to deploy it in today’s tough environment”.
What Macron referred to is the European Anti-Coercion Instrument (the “ACI”), adopted by Regulation 2023/2675 (the “ACI Regulation”). Designed to counter attempts of economic coercion by third states, understood as the interference with the sovereign choices of the EU or its Member States through trade or investment measures, the ACI allows the imposition of “restrictions on the access to the EU market and other economic disadvantages for the third country involved”. For these reasons, the ACI has been nicknamed the trade “bazooka”, and some people started to wonder whether it could be aimed against the US as a response to the threats of new tariffs on countries opposing an American takeover of Greenland.
However, as the primary objective of the ACI is deterrence, the Commission itself admits that the instrument will be most successful if there is no need to use it. Consequently, as the first paragraph will describe, de-escalation is key and the procedure focuses on dialogue and diplomatic safeguards. Then, the attention will turn to the decision-making mechanisms of the ACI, analysing how the bazooka’s trigger can be pulled when 27 fingers press on it. Finally, paragraph three will assess the ACI from an international law point of view, highlighting the risk of backfire.
Overview
The Anti-Coercion Instrument is, first and foremost, a tool of deterrence. It is characterised by strict principles and rules that aim to give priority to the peaceful achievement of a solution through negotiations between the third countries. However, the term often used to describe it seems quite fitting: a bazooka.
With the introduction of the Anti-Coercion Instrument, the Regulation aims at providing the EU with a legal framework for responding to economic coercion, namely a situation where a third country pressures the Union or a Member State into making a particular choice by applying measures affecting trade or investment. Such pressure amounts to an economic coercion when it unduly interferes with legitimate sovereign choices of the Union and its Member States (Art. 2(1) of the “ACI Regulation”). It was proposed in late 2021 after China posed significant economic threats and restrictions against Lithuanian companies, following Lithuania’s decision to allow Taiwan to open a representative office in Vilnius. The ACI Regulation went into force in December 2023, but it has never been activated yet. Response measures represent only the last resort after deployment of all possible diplomatic efforts; however, when activated, they can be a pretty strong incentive to stop any economic blackmail occurring.
Under ACI, the EU can impose high tariffs on the third Country’s exports or restrict its access to the EU single market in a variety of ways. The countermeasures may target trade in goods through customs duties, licensing requirements, or transit restrictions, as well as services and foreign direct investment, among other measures listed in Annex I and referred to in Article 8 of the Regulation. They could even limit access to public tenders and affect the protection and commercial exploitation of intellectual property rights. To describe it with an image, it works as a padlock that opens and closes. When closed, it shuts out of the EU market, with hardly any economic interaction coming from the coercing Country. Essentially, if adopted, it could freeze a trade axis between a certain country and the whole EU, in the blink of an eye.
Due to the huge impacts that those economic measures could also have on European industries, procedural hurdles are set extremely high. The Regulation establishes a process of extensive consultation and negotiation before any final response measures are imposed. It also provides for the possibility of suspending the measures at any time should the third country suspend its coercive actions (Art. 12 ACI Regulation).
Between Cohesion and Effectiveness: Voting Rules in the ACI Framework
The ACI is activated based on a Qualified Majority Voting (QMV) procedure rather than a unanimous one. The process begins with the Commission examining a third-country measure and assessing whether the measure represents economic coercion. Rapidity is important, and this phase should normally take no longer than four months. Once the Commission concludes the existence of coercion, it is then up to the Council to formally confirm the finding with an implementing act approved by a qualified majority, again acting expeditiously (Art. 5 ACI Regulation). Once it is positively assessed that coercion exists, a negotiation channel is opened by the Commission, attempting to peacefully achieve an autonomous cessation. As always, de-escalation is key. The strong measures are a last resort solution: pursuant to Article 8 of the ACI Regulation, the EU is legitimised in adopting response measures only where negotiations fail.
These response measures, which led commentators to label the ACI a “trade bazooka”, are adopted by the Commission based on a procedure known as the “examination procedure” (Article 18 of the ACI Regulation, which refers to Article 5 of the so-called “Comitology Regulation”). The examination procedure is normally used for particularly sensitive matters and is designed to give Member States greater control, which is precisely the case for the ACI’s highly politically impactful measures. Accordingly, ACI response measures can only be adopted by the Commission after obtaining a positive opinion from a Committee composed of one representative from each Member State. The decision within the Committee is taken again by QMV by the Member States, reflecting each one’s demographic weight.
Choosing to rely on QMV for the adoption of ACI response measures is surprising in some way. While it is true that QMV is the standard in areas such as trade and the internal market, it is undeniable that these measures are not merely instruments of a commercial policy nature. They clearly go beyond ordinary trade regulation, potentially affecting the Union’s broader external relations. Member states are traditionally very much reluctant to relinquish the Unanimity rule, which is still regarded as a crucial safeguard for their sovereignty and against internal fragmentation. By requiring the consent of all Member States, unanimity preserves cohesion and prevents politically sensitive decisions from deepening divisions or undermining unity in delicate domains, with no major political choice affecting all Member States being adopted against the will of a minority of them. However, unanimity is also a very much lengthier procedure, as reaching a unanimous consensus obviously entails longer negotiations, making impactful and risky choices often unreachable.
However, QMV doesn’t entail that adopting the most hard-hitting response measures will be so easy in practice: the fact that the vote takes place under the comitology rules, where demographic weight legitimately plays a role in the approval process, means that a strategic coalition of very few but demographically large countries could still in practice veto their adoption. And this is what seemed to happen not even a month ago, when Italy and Germany expressed concerns regarding the activation of ACI in response to Trump’s threats. The concerns raised by those countries are not merely egoistically linked to their own bilateral economic relations with the US; they stem from a broader uncertainty, the very uncertainty that makes activation of the ACI a significant European gamble: the fact that nothing similar has ever been used before, and that we therefore do not truly know its possible chain reactions.
The Implementation of ACI Under International Law
Should the Member States reach the cohesion required, the ACI could still be difficult to implement, especially when the economic coercion is not directed towards the EU as a whole, but rather to a number of its Member States. In light of the recent developments, the crucial question is assessing to what extent the ACI could be used to counter a trade war against Denmark and those European countries that oppose an American takeover of Greenland.
Under international law, the measures contained in Annex I of Regulation 2023/2675 can amount to “countermeasures”, which have been partially regulated by the International Law Commission (ILC) in the Articles on the Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts (ARSIWA). To put it simply, countermeasures are violations of international obligations by an injured state that are justified insofar as they represent the response to an internationally wrongful act (Art. 22 ARSIWA). In the framework of ACI, certain attempts of economic coercion can amount to an internationally wrongful act, justifying the adoption of countermeasures by the EU.
With regards to the Greenland crisis, this means that in case of a US trade war against Denmark and some other Member States, these countries would be justified in breaching the international obligation that they bear towards the US. However, the ACI provides for what can be described as a multilateralization of the countermeasures, since “in response to the unlawful coercion of a single Member State (…) the EU itself may adopt a countermeasure that is then implemented by the national authorities of all other Member States”. While the multilateralization of the countermeasures is the strength of the ACI, this feature is highly contentious under international law, as reflected in the ILC Commentary to Art. 54 ARSIWA. In a nutshell, if the ACI were implemented, there would be an asymmetric situation: while the US exercised pressure on some European countries, all 27 Member States would be called upon to implement countermeasures against Washington, even those who didn’t support Denmark and were not “coerced”.
But why would a state which was not targeted by the White House be justified in taking countermeasures against it? Two possible justifications can be found in Recital 10 of Regulation 2023/2675. First, given the unparalleled economic integration that characterises the EU, the economic coercion of one Member State affects the Union’s internal market, and therefore the Union as a whole. Secondly, Member States could not counteract coercion acting on their own, since the common commercial policy has been conferred to the EU as an exclusive competence pursuant to Article 207 TFEU.
Both arguments stem from the conceptualisation of the EU as a “sui generis” international organisation, a revealing definition that is however far from being settled under international law, especially in terms of its implications. More specifically, the economic damage that all Member States would suffer does not in itself amount to a legal justification to breach international obligations towards a third State, while the allocation of competences between the EU and its Member States is a matter of internal relevance, which may not be opposable to third countries. In sum, the ACI correctly identifies the threat of a collective response as the key to deter economic coercion, but its implementation could be challenged under international law.
Conclusions
In a world where market access, foreign investments, and supply chains are more and more weaponised, deterrence is vital. This is even more true for the EU, which is not only the second largest exporter and importer of goods in the world, but also trades primarily with the two major world powers, the US and China, for imports and exports respectively. Accordingly, the ACI is not mainly a weapon of retaliation, but rather a device of anticipation, the strength of which lies in the threat that the Union could, if necessary, mobilise its collective economic weight. However, deterrence requires credibility, and translating economic potential into credible threats is not to be taken for granted for an entity that has always preferred soft power over hard security strategies and escalation dominance. Having some bullets in the chamber is necessary, but not sufficient.
The ACI can only function if supported by both a real and perceived cohesion among the 27 Member States. The choice of QMV reflects an attempt to reconcile effectiveness with unity, but in practice larger states can shape or stall its activation. If divisions prevail, if selective tariffs or bilateral pressures succeed in fragmenting the European front, the credibility of the instrument would collapse. At the same time, activating the ACI is not without risks, especially if economic coercion is not exercised towards the EU as a whole, but rather to a group of individual Member States. Its implementation may pull the Member States apart and raise contentious questions under international law, damaging the Union’s image as a predictable and rules-based actor.
In sum, the ACI is a powerful tool, but it must be handled with care. If the EU tried to trigger the “bazooka” without internal cohesion, it would risk shooting itself in the foot. On the contrary, if the EU reached a political consensus, there would be no need to fire at all.
For Further Reading
- D. Carretta, O. Grimm, C. Spillmann, Surprise: European deterrence works with Trump, in Morning Post Europe, 22 Januay 2026
- H. Farrell, A. Newman, The Weaponized World Economy, Foreign Affairs, Sept./Oct. 2025
- E.V. McLean, Economic Coercion, in Pevehouse, Jon C. W., and Leonard Seabrooke (eds), The Oxford Handbook of International Political Economy, Oxford Handbooks (2025; online edn, Oxford Academic, 12 May 2021)
