A year on from Joe Biden's defeat of Donald Trump in the U.S. presidential election, the two sides have suspended their disputes over aircraft subsidies and steel and aluminum tariffs and launched an alliance to cooperate on future technologies.

"One can say that this year was indeed a breakthrough year for EU-U.S. trade relations," European Commission Executive Vice-President Valdis Dombrovskis said in an interview for the Reuters Next conference.

On steel, the United States has replaced tariffs on all EU imports with tariff-free quotas based on historical volumes. Dombrovskis said the end result in two years had to be a complete lifting of tariffs and quotas.