GENEVA — The United States has cleared the final procedural hurdle in order to impose tariffs on billions of dollars of European products later this month, at a meeting of the WTO's (World Trade Organization) governing body on Monday. The administration of President Donald Trump no longer faces any legal obstacles for its set of previously scheduled sanctions against European goods that could now take effect Friday, after a three-person WTO tribunal of arbitrators earlier this month issued a ruling that allowed the enactment of $7.5 billion worth of countermeasures — an historically high amount. According to a Geneva trade official, the U.S. ambassador to the WTO, Dennis Shea, told WTO members that the size of the award approved Monday documents a point the U.S. has long made, that European subsidies to Airbus had caused massive harm to the U.S. economy over the course of several decades. In the absence of a last-minute negotiated settlement between Washington and Brussels, the tariffs will kick in on a medley of products that range from Scotch whisky, to French wine, Spanish olives and Italian cheese. The Dispute Settlement Body (DSB) that adopted the arbitrators' Oct. 2 ruling is essentially the WTO's general council, and consists of all WTO members. The U.S. had requested the emergency meeting at the WTO's headquarters on the shores of Lake Geneva, and the outcome was always going to be "in practice a foregone conclusion," according to Joshua Paine, a senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute in Luxembourg, who focuses on international adjudication law.

14 March 2018, Germany, Frankfurt am Main: An Airbus A380 (L) and a retro design Boeing 747-8 cross each others path at the ramp of Frankfurt Airport. picture alliance | picture alliance | Getty Images

That's because of the DSB's "negative consensus" rule, whereby any WTO member that wants to block a ruling must persuade all other members, including the country that initiated the complaint, to join it in voting against the decision. According to the trade official's account, the U.S. ambassador Shea said it had always preferred a negotiated settlement but that it hoped the countermeasures that take effect later this week would "encourage the EU to agree to a genuine cessation of its WTO-inconsistent subsidies and the adverse effects that flow from them." The outgoing European Commissioner for Trade, Cecilia Malmstrom, told CNBC earlier this month that she had offered the U.S. fresh proposals on civilian aircraft manufacturing, and in a statement she had also said that if the DSB were to authorize the countermeasures, as was the case today, any U.S. decision to move forward with them would be "short-sighted and counterproductive." Airbus insists that it is now fully compliant with previous WTO rulings, and said it expects another WTO panel to confirm that compliance is complete before the end of the year. Last week, French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire warned that if American tariffs take effect on Friday, Europe will not have "any other choice but to also take measures." And so soon after a temporary truce between the U.S. and China began to appear possible, the economic implications of a fresh trade confrontation has been raising concerns among European government officials and investors alike. "The risk of a U.S. trade conflict with the EU continues to loom large," said Holger Schmieding, the chief economist at the German private bank Berenberg, in a Monday research note. Under the WTO's definitions, the arbitrators' ruling on Airbus is not a "punishment" and instead is a "remedy," but next month the U.S. may also seek to impose separate and more controversial penalties on European auto manufacturers, predicated on a view that they represent a threat to U.S. national security.