Addressing the House of Lords International Agreements Committee on Monday, Mr Reynolds said: “To state the obvious, tariffs on UK goods entering the US would be a difficult thing for us to have to contend with. The US is a major and important trading partner for the UK, £300bn of bilateral trade.
“But compared to the EU with over £800bn of bilateral trade, clearly if there are things that we are offered or asked to do that would result in an adverse relationship on the European side, we’d have to weigh the consequences of that.”
Mr Reynolds added that Britain would be “much more exposed” in a trade war with Beijing than the US.
He said: “We have just got to be clear with the British people that if there were to be a much wider trade confrontation between China and the West, as a much more globally orientated trading nation the UK is much more exposed than say the US.
“So simply being asked to replicate what another country is proposing might be a much more painful proposition for the UK than it might first appear to people not aware of just how trade-intensity affects our economy.”
Mr Reynolds’s comments risk a diplomatic row at a time when Labour is seeking to repair relations with the president-elect.
They come just days after Andrew Bailey, the Governor of the Bank of England, said the UK must rebuild relations with the EU as he claimed Brexit had undermined the British economy and warned Mr Trump’s tariffs would hurt global growth.