Ohn what and who, exactly, is America leaving? U.S. trade agreements, initiatives, and other commitments range from the very general, such as new tariff liberalization and blanket bans on licensing and discriminatory import fees, to the more specific, such as commitments to eliminate tariffs. customs on individual products and rules to ensure that international express delivery companies have an expedited means of customs clearance at the border.

America’s goals for these agreements have regularly evolved and changed, whether to open new markets, create trade rules to lead new growth sectors such as the digital economy, or bring up to date and fill the gaps in previous rules to respond to the new conditions of its commercial relations and trade flows. As she negotiated to achieve her latest goals, she did so by working within these rules and often expanding upon them further. These core rules and principles, in turn, underpinned thousands of other detailed commitments that America expected from other agreements and understandings with individual countries. The main difficulty of these agreements was convincing trading partners to accept American terms, or at least a satisfactory version of them.

Since 2017, however, the hallmark of the U.S. approach has been to directly question or ignore – and thus retreat from – many of these same fundamental rules and norms. He did it in different ways. This includes withdrawing one’s own attempts or preventing other attempts from relying more on them to advance them and thus reinforce the status quo. More aggressive has been its insistence on changing or securing new terms for these rules by threatening to withdraw from the entire deal – in other words, to accept the new US terms or otherwise. It has also pursued both foreign trade and domestic policy goals by simply ignoring its ongoing obligations to these rules rather than working within them.

The cumulative significance of these policy changes has been to profoundly shake the trading system, a system to which America, after 75 years, no longer has a priority to remain committed. Instead, America has deliberately dissociated itself and openly questioned the wisdom and effectiveness of many of the rules and norms it helped create for itself and the world. A powerful answer is that since other countries have sometimes acted less constrained by the need to prioritize or follow these rules and norms, America is just as justified in breaking away from them, with little inhibition or restraint, to pursue and protect its interests. While the first point is certainly true, legions of U.S. officials and members of Congress have aggressively challenged, formed alliances, and used other levers to push back against these trading partners, all while maintaining the belief that fundamentally undermining the rules and standards for doing so would amount to doing so. that in itself would not do a disservice to American interests.

So the central question is not whether America has the right to assert its commercial interests – it always has. Rather, it is why and how America’s policymakers today have redefined these interests and come to make radically different choices about how to advance them. They did so by turning away from the rules-based post-war trading system, which had profound implications for its future viability and stability.

This book aims to explore these and other fundamental changes in more detail. It begins by describing the choices America made to separate itself from the fundamental rules and norms that underpin the international trading system before examining the impact of the new U.S. policy on its trade relations in the Asia-Pacific region.

For context, I describe four fundamental elements of the international trading system that the United States played a leading role in creating in 1947 and continued to shape decades later, in the face of decisions made beginning in 2017 that undermined this very system. The Biden administration and the US Congress have abandoned the first essential element of the international system, the “open trade” standard of advancing ever more liberalized trade.

Although America has at times wavered in its commitment to this standard, it has regularly engaged with other countries, collectively or individually, to advance successive negotiations to reduce tariffs and remove other barriers to commerce. Since taking office, the Biden administration has rejected all opportunities and proposals to participate in further reciprocal tariff reduction negotiations, while placing much lower priority on efforts to remove non-tariff barriers to U.S. exports. in pursuit of other objectives.

Similarly, since 2015, the US Congress has failed to approve any agreements or pass legislation to further open the US market to anything other than symbolic new access. In fact, by failing to act for more than three years to renew limited and conditional programs providing tariff reductions on certain imports, including a program supporting mutually beneficial trade with the world’s developing countries, he has failed to act. actually works in the opposite direction by reducing access. The Trump administration has abandoned the second essential element, the principle of most favored nation treatment.

Sometimes called the principle of reciprocity, this obligation enshrined in the rules requires that each member of the system offers the same conditions of access to its market as it grants to all other members of the system. For goods and services, each country designs its own liberalization “package” to negotiate with other members who do the same, allowing each to retain greater control over the sectors it liberalizes compared to others. Once compromises have been made and these packages have been agreed upon through negotiation, everyone must, in turn, provide their access package to everyone in the system.

Although a limited number of important (and sometimes quite significant) exceptions can be used, the aim is to prevent countries from subsequently offering better conditions to some than to others. The Trump administration has flouted this fundamental principle of non-discrimination by threatening and implementing significant unilateral tariff increases against several countries. This included significant tariff hikes directed at specific partners, such as China, as well as global steel and aluminum exporters. These tariffs, widely seen as violating international trade rules, have been kept in place by two US administrations.

The Biden administration and the US Congress have renounced the third fundamental principle, called national treatment, which requires members to provide equitable treatment to imported and domestic products and services. The purpose of this principle, sometimes called the level playing field rule, is to prevent countries from erecting discriminatory barriers through laws, regulations or other practices intended to put imports at a disadvantage relative to their domestic producers. Due to the complexity of the barriers that countries can use to discriminate or disadvantage, many additional rules have subsequently been developed to cover more specific situations. Some of them affect the entire economy, such as minimum standards for government regulatory transparency or anti-corruption rules. Others aimed to establish a level playing field for foreign exporters and companies in narrow industrial sectors, whether financial services or agricultural products.

When the US Congress approved and President Biden signed a new law in 2022 establishing billions of dollars in US government-funded consumer subsidies for the purchase of electric cars, they deliberately ignored this fundamental principle of no -discrimination. The program was opened to products made in the United States, but strict limits were later placed on other countries where cars and some of their components could come from and still be eligible.

The Trump administration abandoned the fourth element, which is to provide a dispute resolution mechanism for members of the system to hold each other accountable for their obligations. The mechanism has evolved over the years, but the basic approach remains unchanged: a member who claims another is violating a trade rule can file a complaint which is then reviewed by a panel of experts. If the plaintiff is successful, it is allowed to take action, most often to increase its rates proportionately to the other member until it stops the practice. The Trump administration exploited a loophole to break this trade dispute resolution mechanism, then made it clear that it was perfectly comfortable leaving it as is.

Concretely, breaking this policy for the world also made it easier and easier for the Trump administration to ignore America’s own trade commitments. The Biden administration, after much delay, finally committed to working with other members to explore a compromise to make this mechanism functional again, but it continued to insist that it would not only if it were fundamentally reformed. At the time of publication of this book, it remains unclear whether such a compromise can be reached to make it functional again and raises many concerns.

This excerpt from “Walking Out: America’s New Trade Policy in the Asia Pacific and Beyond” by Michael S Beeman is published with permission from Stanford University Press. The title was published by the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and distributed by SUP.