When I spoke to André Sapir, a senior fellow at the economic think tank Bruegel and a former economic adviser to the president of the European Commission, in March, he told me it’s unusual for countries to short-circuit the process this way. When the U.S. attempted to impose steel tariffs in 2002 under then-President George W. Bush, the EU held off moving to impose retaliatory tariffs until the WTO ruled in its favor in 2003. The trade organization’s authorization, Sapir told me in March, “gave the green light to the EU and other parties to take countermeasures.”

This time around, the EU and its partners won’t be waiting. “They are acting out of frustration,” Sapir told me this week. “They’ve never faced such a situation, so they are reacting in an unusual manner to an unusual set of circumstances.”

Matthew Oxenford, a researcher on transatlantic economic relations at Chatham House in London, told me that U.S. trading partners may be opting not to follow the rules because they don’t believe Trump will either. In that case, what’s the point? “The difference is the last time they had to do this was in 2002 with the Bush tariffs—then they did go through the WTO process, they got a favorable ruling, and they were prepared to implement it and then Bush backed off and let the tariffs expire,” he said of the EU, adding: “If Trump receives an unfavorable WTO ruling, that in itself isn’t going to put anymore pressure on him to withdraw from the tariffs that he has implemented than actually having retaliatory tariffs implemented on themselves would.”

Trump has made no secret of his disregard for global trade rules. He has accused the WTO of being biased against the U.S., arguing that its adjudication is “set up. You can’t win.” His administration has exercised its power to block nominations of judges to fill vacant seats of the WTO’s seven-person appellate body, which adjudicates disputes between countries (it is currently down to its last four judges, one of whose terms will expire in September). He has even threatened to pull the U.S. out of the trade body altogether. But the EU and others’ decision to base their reaction on Trump’s apparent indifference to the global trading order could end up doing more harm to it than good. By opting to retaliate before a WTO consideration, they could be unintentionally helping to undermine the very system they are trying to protect.

“The WTO works insofar as it does because every country knows that a full blown trade war will not be in anybody’s interest,” Oxenford said. “They want to make sure that there’s a set of rules that everybody follows and that those rules are enforced in a proportionate way so that rule breakers receive some sort of sanction for their action. … That sort of architecture no longer makes sense when somebody is willing to blow right through it—especially a country as large as the United States.”