It’s possible to overstate the changes in policy by Donald Trump and his administration. Case in point: this Washington Post Wonkblog item headlined “‘None of these big quagmire deals’: Trump spells out historic shift in approach to trade.”
The thesis is that Trump is abandoning multilateral trade deals and, supposedly for the first time, concentrating on bilateral trade deals between the United States and individual foreign nations. Writer Ana Swanson goes on to point out the difficulties of negotiating such deals and argues that having different trade regulations apply to different countries will pose problems for U.S. exporters. Subtext: Trump is messing things up in a way his predecessors never did.
It’s true that Trump has officially rejected the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement with multiple countries negotiated by the Obama administration. But it was a dead duck already. During the campaign, Hillary Clinton said she opposed it too. And even if she had been elected and reversed herself, as some on the Democratic Left feared, or even if Barack Obama had somehow been elected to another term in 2016, it’s not at all clear that TPP could have passed in the House.
Support for free trade agreements by House Democrats has faded toward nonexistence: 102 House Democrats voted for the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993, but only 25 House Democrats voted for trade promotion authority in 2002, and only 28 House Democrats did in 2015. Bottom line: Multilateral free trade agreements were on the way out before the votes were counted last Nov. 8.
So will the Trump administration be setting a new precedent by negotiating bilateral trade agreements with individual countries? Not at all.
The United States has been negotiating such treaties for many years, with the pace picking up during the George W. Bush administration and slackening but not ending with the Obama administration. Here’s Wikipedia’s list of countries with which such agreements have been concluded: Israel (1985), Canada (1988, superseded by NAFTA in 1994), Jordan (2001), Australia (2004), Chile (2004), Singapore (2004), Bahrain (2006), Morocco (2006), Oman (2006), Peru (2007), Panama (2012), Colombia (2012), South Korea (2012).
The list includes some hefty economic powers, and if Donald Trump expands it by negotiating as he has promised a free trade agreement with post-Brexit Britain, he will be following a precedent established by Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
Historic shift? Not exactly.
