A Guide to Trade Talks, Trump-Style: Is His Unorthodox Approach Working?
One of the most ambitious international trade agreements of the past half century, the Uruguay Round was also one of the most complex. At nearly 300,000 pages of legal text, the deal took eight years to hammer out, spanning three US presidencies and leading in 1994 to the establishment of the World Trade Organization. The WTO's rules have brought more order to international commerce and a steady reduction in trade barriers that helped to boost the volume of global trade by 4% every year since the Geneva-based body was founded.
To President Donald Trump, however, America's trading partners have swerved or gamed the WTO rules, maintaining many barriers to the import of US goods, creating new ones and 'ripping off' the world's biggest economy in the process. The plan for his second term in office is to ditch the old, consensual approach to trade negotiations and level the playing field through strength and coercion, imposing hefty tariffs on goods from nations that sell more to the US than they buy in return. The levies will either be a permanent feature of trade going forward, tipping the scales to favor US domestic industries, or a bargaining chip that quickly forces nations at the receiving end to lower barriers to American goods and services exports.
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