As Donald Trump prepares to return to the White House for a second term, it is an opportune time to examine the trade policies in his first term, as well as their treatment under President Biden. A new book provides a provocative assessment of those policies. Michael Beeman, a former Assistant US Trade Representative, presents an insider’s account of policymaking across the Trump and Biden administrations in his recently published book, Walking Out: America’s New Policy in the Asia-Pacific and Beyond. As a senior USTR official from 2017 to 2023 (and an earlier stint), he offers a broad perspective on the forces that have shaped US trade policies since the mid-2010s and led America to walk out of “the very trading system it helped establish, shape and promote” over the past 75 years and pursue a new trade policy.
The book argues that a decades-long, bipartisan consensus supporting free trade and the rules-based trading system “ultimately succumbed to the emergence of America’s zero-sum-centered policies,” which left no room for compromises and fundamentally transformed its trade policies. It points out that one manifestation of this shift has been “America’s turn toward results-based, instead of rules- and principles-based, trade and related industrial policies.”
Beeman details how under the Trump and Biden administrations, the US has walked out of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Asia-Pacific region, beginning with the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the liberalization of trade, and developing countries.
The former USTR official points to three major ways the country “drove an American truck over the WTO system” in pursuit of its new trade policy. It did so by breaking the WTO dispute settlement system that held America and others accountable to international trade rules, by relying on a national security justification in an attempt “to skirt around the WTO’s rules when imposing new tariffs on the world,” and by resorting to unilateralism with tariffs against China and other trading partners (after promising to give up its use of unilateralism in the creation of the WTO with a strong dispute settlement system). Moreover, since 2017, the US has refused to engage in any new negotiations that included trade liberalization.
Beeman details America’s problems with the Trans-Pacific Partnership and President Trump’s withdrawal of the US from that agreement at the beginning of his first term, US attempts to forge a new trade model in the Asia Pacific, and “the madness of its method.” As the US negotiator, he offers valuable insights into the limited renegotiation of the South Korea Free Trade Agreement and the negotiation of the US-Japan Agreement, which was aimed at gaining some of the access to Japan’s market that the US lost when it left the TPP. He also describes the Biden administration’s Indo-Pacific Economic Framework as “America’s deconstructed trade model.”
In America’s retreat from free and open global trade, Beeman contends that it “walling off the home market” by embracing domestic preferences, abandoning services liberalization, and surrendering digital trade leadership.
Beeman asserts that the US has walked out on developing countries by failing to renew a decades-old trade preference program intended to help many of the world’s poorest countries improve through trade with America. He points to how a program that for decades had bipartisan support is now paralyzed by conflicting objectives.
The book concludes with a sober assessment: “As America continues to walk out on the international trading system, it does so at the ever-increasing risk that it will also leave the system irreparably broken and irrelevant. It is also likely to continue to do so as long as America continues to engage in its search for itself.”
Jean Heilman Grier
November 20, 2024