President Donald Trump said he would impose about $60 billion worth of annual tariffs on Chinese imports Thursday as the White House moved to punish China for what it says is a pattern of co-opting U.S. technology and trade secrets and robbing companies of jobs and billions of dollars in revenue.

The measures occur as the White House grants a long list of exemptions to U.S. allies from steel and aluminum tariffs that go into effect Friday, including the European Union, which has lobbied aggressively and publicly for relief from the trade action.

“The word that I want to use is reciprocal,” Trump said in announcing the tariffs in the Diplomatic Room of the White House. “If they charge us, we charge them the same thing.”

The China tariffs are his strongest trade action yet against a country he has branded an “economic enemy.”

They fulfill one of his core campaign pledges, to demand more reciprocal deals with trading partners around the world.

But coupled with the administration’s decision to exempt the European Union, South Korea, Brazil, Canada, and Mexico from the tariffs on cheap metals, the action demonstrates how much Trump’s nationalist trade agenda is really targeted at a single country: China.

“What the United States is doing is strategically defending itself from China’s economic aggression,” said Peter Navarro, director of the White House National Trade Council and an architect of the measures. “We repeatedly aired our concerns about China as a nonmarket economy.”

The tariffs, which the U.S. trade representative will publish within 15 days, will target 1,300 lines of Chinese goods — everything from shoes and clothing to electronics, administration officials said.

Trump, the officials said, will also direct the Treasury Department to impose restrictions on Chinese investment in U.S. technology companies — a practice that they said the Chinese government uses to develop its own “national champions” in cutting-edge industries such as artificial intelligence and autonomous vehicles.

“The end objective of this is to get China to modify its unfair trade practices,” said Everett Eissenstat, deputy director of the National Economic Council.

Markets shudder

The prospect of growing trade tensions between the world’s two largest economies spooked global financial markets.

The Stoxx Europe 600 index fell by nearly 2 percent. Germany’s DAX fell by more than 2 percent as investors digested the threat to the country’s export-driven economy. In the United States, the S&P 500 index dropped by more than 1.5 percent.