Trump’s trade confusion

Editorial

The Washington Post

There’s a “basic problem” with Trump’s approach to trade negotiations, said The Washington Post. “No one—not American trading partners, not American business and workers—can tell whether the president actually would accept a compromise” on his often extreme demands. Even if you grant that there is “some strategic value” to using threats as a negotiating tool, the downsides of the uncertainty Trump has injected into the global trading system seem to outweigh any upside. A two-day meeting last week between U.S. and Chinese officials, aimed at averting a trade war, ended “with an agreement to meet again later, and little else.” Part of the problem is that the U.S. delegation paired its reasonable demands with arbitrary ones, including a $200 billion reduction in the bilateral trade deficit by the end of 2020. Trump seems to believe that using “uncertainty as a weapon” will result in concessions from Beijing, just as he seems convinced it will force Canada and Mexico to yield on his NAFTA demands. In reality, our northern and southern neighbors are “hedging against Trump’s unpredictability by pursuing closer economic ties with China and Europe.” NAFTA talks have now gone on so long that there’s a danger Congress won’t have time to ratify any new agreement before the midterms. If that happens, “Trump may have no plan B.”