scholarly journals Trump Administration Continues Trade Negotiations with Major Trade Partners

2020 ◽  
Vol 114 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-142

In the fall of 2019, the Trump administration reached several trade arrangements, some of them tentative, with important U.S. trade partners. On October 11, 2019, China and the United States announced a preliminary trade deal subject to finalization—one that came after more than a year of escalating tariffs. Just a week earlier, the United States had signed two trade agreements with Japan, one regarding tariff reductions and the other regarding digital trade. None of these deals appear to require subsequent congressional approval in the eyes of the executive branch, unlike the earlier United States-Mexico-Canada-Agreement (USMCA), which was signed in November 2018 and whose fate in Congress appears promising as of mid-December of 2019. In addition to these trade arrangements, the fall of 2019 saw several developments in trade relations between the United States and the European Union tied to the long-running trade disputes.

2018 ◽  
Vol 112 (4) ◽  
pp. 751-759 ◽  

Over the summer of 2018, trade relations between the United States and many of its trading partners continued to be marked by tensions. The United States and China ratcheted up their use of tariffs against each other. The United States both received and initiated requests for consultation with various countries at the World Trade Organization (WTO) related to its earlier steel and aluminum tariffs and to tariffs imposed in response by other countries. President Trump has continued to pursue the possibility of further tariffs, including with respect to automobile and uranium imports. The United States also escalated trade tensions with Turkey through various measures, explicitly linking some of these measures to Turkey's detainment of an American pastor. Despite the broader theme of tensions, negotiations have proved productive between the United States and two of its major trading partners—the European Union and Mexico—paving a way for future settlements. With the European Union, the Trump administration has reached a tentative understanding and agreed not to impose new tariffs while the parties negotiate toward finalizing this understanding. As to Mexico, in late August 2018 the Trump administration announced that the two countries had reached agreement with respect to many issues underlying their ongoing North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) negotiations.


2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (5) ◽  
pp. 680-704 ◽  
Author(s):  
Federico Ortino ◽  
Emily Lydgate

Abstract The number of international agreements purporting to liberalise trade, mainly focused on reducing protectionist measures through the imposition of general principles, has increased greatly over the last 25 years. More recently, the United States and the European Union (EU) concluded comprehensive agreements covering trade in goods, trade in services, and foreign investment. This article inquires whether, and the extent to which, such agreements represent a departure from previous practice. It focuses on (a) the instruments employed to address domestic regulation affecting trade in services and (b) three specific agreements concluded between 2016 and 2018: the EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, and the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. While these recent Preferential Trade Agreements put forward novel approaches to regulatory diversity affecting trade in services, it is too early to ascertain whether these will have any ground-breaking impact in terms of services trade liberalisation.


AJIL Unbound ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 111 ◽  
pp. 389-394 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Lande ◽  
Dennis Matanda

In an era in which multilateral trade arrangements have garnered more public notoriety than ever before, the suboptimal trade and investment relationship between America and Africa, as underpinned by the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), is one of the less controversial ones. AGOA could nevertheless use some adjustments or augmentations to facilitate deeper U.S.-Africa commercial relations. For instance, adjusting AGOA's origin rules could nudge the private sector on both sides of the Atlantic towards gains for U.S. and African employment and the reduction of trade deficits. Africa must leverage the period before AGOA expires to redefine its trade relationship with the United States in innovative ways. The United States should welcome these measures, since the type of value that Africa would add to the global supply chain would not replace the high-quality jobs that the Trump Administration would like to see in the United States. In fact, this type of production would make U.S. manufacturing more competitive.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 131-170
Author(s):  
V. I. Bartenev

This paper identifi es and explains key changes in the U.S. aid policies towards Arab countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) under Donald Trump. It seeks to validate two widespread arguments — the one about the current administration’s revision of pivotal principles of providing foreign assistance, and the other one — about an accelerated disengagement of the United States from the MENA region since 2017. The paper consists of four sections. The fi rst section explores the transformation of the U.S. strategic thinking and regional context under the Trump administration and then posits fi ve hypotheses about possible changes in the volume and composition of the U.S. assistance to the MENA region (in comparison with the fi nal two years of the Obama administration), as well as the diff erences in the executive branch and the Congress’s positions. The second section explains particularities of the statistical data and the methods of its exploration, the third section presents the results of hypothesis testing using aggregated data on aid fl ows to the region, and the fi nal section explains these results, sometimes unexpected, using the data disaggregated by country. Three of fi ve hypotheses proved wrong based on the aggregate data. First, the Trump administration did not cut assistance to the MENA more substantially than to other regions of the globe. Second, it did not ringfence aid accounts which helped yield direct dividends to the U.S. businesses. Third, the Republican Congress was clearly less willing to support the executive’s aid chocies under a new Republican President than during the last years of a Democrat Barack Obama’s second term. Only two hypotheses proved correct — one about a prioritization of security and military assistance under Donald Trump and the other one — about disproportionate cuts of democracy promotion assistance. Such an unexpected result calls for refi ning both aforementioned arguments and taking into account the dissimilarities in the dynamics of assistance to diff erent countries. The United States tends to practice a diff erentiated approach in dealing with two largest Arab aid recipients (Egypt and Jordan) and with other Arab countries. The assistance to Cairo and Amman is ringfenced and protected, while aid to other recipients, including security assistance and FMF grants, is prone to quite drastic cuts. This diff erentiation is explained by the fact that cooperation with Egypt and Jordan rests not only on more solid strategic foundations but also on a strong support within the United States — both from the defense contractors interested in large export contracts and from an infl uential pro-Israel lobby. The U.S. will not abandon this highly diff erentiated approach after the 2020 elections but the structure of assistance to the MENA region might undergo quite a dramatic transformation.


2017 ◽  
Vol 111 (3) ◽  
pp. 776-781

Iran, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, Germany, and the European Union agreed to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in July 2015. Under the JCPOA, Iran agreed to limit the scope and content of its nuclear program in exchange for relief from various nuclear-related sanctions imposed by the other signatories. Throughout his campaign, President Donald Trump denounced the JCPOA. He said that, if elected, he would “renegotiate with Iran—right after … enabl[ing] the immediate release of our American prisoners and ask[ing] Congress to impose new sanctions that stop Iran from having the ability to sponsor terrorism around the world.” So far, however, the Trump administration has kept the agreement in place. The United States has continued to acknowledge Iran's compliance with the terms of the JCPOA and has waived various sanctions against Iran in compliance with its own obligations thereunder. Iran, by contrast, has charged the United States with failing to live up to its own JCPOA commitments.


2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (12) ◽  
pp. 25
Author(s):  
Suzana Dobric Veiss

<p>Cross-cultural leadership attempts to understand how leaders function in a highly globalized market.  Certain dimensions of the three leadership theories: charismatic, transformational, and servant were endorsed as important for effective leadership. Major aspects of the leadership theories were compared and contrasted in three different cultures.  The cultures were selected by utilizing the GLOBE study: Anglo cluster with focus on the United States, Latin America cluster with focus on Mexico, and Eastern European cluster with focus on Croatia. While certain aspects of charismatic, transformational, and servant leadership were endorsed as important for effective leadership, only certain dimensions were endorsed across the three cultures studied.  Analysis of Croatia, not available in the original GLOBE study, provides a more comprehensive evaluation of leadership in the region, especially since Croatia has recently emerged as the latest country joining the European Union.  </p>


Author(s):  
K. O. Chudinova

The increasing level of tension in the trade relations between the United States and other countries, especially China; the potential escalation of trade wars, when countries take more and more explicit retaliatory protectionist measures, becomes a sustainability risk to development of international trade. The US actions taken in 2018–2019 to protect the internal market turned into into a full-fledged trade war, directed primarily against China - the country the United States has the largest trade deficit with. The introduction of the US tariff restrictions on imports from China and several other countries has caused retaliatory measures, as a result the uncertainty of the prospects for international trade increases. Non-tariff measures, such as phytosanitary requirements and technical barriers to trade, have also seen an increase in restrictions.An important source of controversy is the different positions of countries regarding the permissible degree of state support for enterprises. Developed countries, especially the United States, Japan, and the countries of the European Union, have fairly rigidly regulated rules regarding free competition. A cause for great concern is not only the US trade war with China and its consequences for other countries, but also the problems of international trade regulation.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sudha N. Setty

Published: Sudha Setty, The President's Private Dictionary: How Secret Definitions Undermine Domestic and Transnational Efforts at Executive Branch Accountability, 24 IND. J. GLOBAL LEGAL STUD. 513 (2017)..The 2016 EU-U.S. Privacy Shield is an agreement allowing companies to move customer data between the European Union and the United States without running afoul of heightened privacy protections in the European Union. It was developed in response to EU concerns that the privacy rights of its citizens have been systematically abrogated by the U.S. government in the name of national security, and contains a variety of assurances that the United States will respect and protect the privacy rights of EU citizens.How trustworthy are the U.S. assurances under the Privacy Shield? Both the Bush and Obama administrations secretly interpreted the terms of treaties, statutes and regulations in a manner that allowed them to take controversial actions, keep those actions secret, and later invoke national security to defend the legality of those actions if they became public. In cases involving torture, bulk data collection, and targeted killing, these administrations did so despite the common and objective understanding of applicable legal constraints not providing authorization for the very actions that they claimed were legal.It remains an open question as to whether the Trump administration will interpret the Privacy Shield in a similarly misleading manner: one in which public assurances suggest compliance with the Privacy Shield’s constraints, but the administration’s private interpretation of the Privacy Shield secretly breaches EU privacy protections. This paper considers possible ways to constrain the executive branch from relying on secret interpretations that would undermine the Privacy Shield’s transnational attempts at accountability


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 58-61
Author(s):  
Chengshuang Lv ◽  
Caihui Wang ◽  
Jiaojiao Xu

The Covid-19 pneumonia epidemic has broken out and spread in more than 215 countries, with more than 7 million confirmed cases worldwide, which will definitely have a huge negative impact on the global economy, and it has also given birth to populism and trade protectionism in some countries such as the United States. In particular, the trade friction between China and the United States has not been completely resolved, and the direction of the trade relationship has become an important issue in the post-epidemic era. Using retrospective research methods, dynamic analysis methods, and path analysis methods, we discovered the uncertainties in Sino-US trade relations under the epidemic. In the post-epidemic era, Sino-US trade relations will show long-term trade disputes, accompanied by complex politicization and normalization of talks while fighting. However, Sino-US trade is highly interdependent and cannot be divided. Therefore, China upholds to jointly build a community with a shared future for mankind, comprehensively deepens reform and opening up, adheres to dialogue and consultation, stabilizes the ballast of economic and trade relations, crosses the "Thucydides trap", and implements the strategy of expanding domestic demand to take the lead in restoring the economy during the epidemic. Responding to the trade war provoked by the United States against China also provides reference for in-depth research on trade-related theories.


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