How Trump’s hatred of international cooperation weakened the China deal – By Jeff Spross (The Week) / Jan 18 2020
The ink on President Trump’s new trade deal with China is still drying, but worries are already growing about whether it can survive.
“Phase 1” of the agreement, which Trump signed Wednesday, only partially addresses the two sides’ beefs with one another: It reduces some tariffs, commits China to purchase more American exports over two years, and includes some provisions to deal with intellectual property and other issues. But a large portion of the tariffs thrown up by both the U.S. and China, as well as American grievances with Chinese trade practices, remain unresolved.
Moreover, it’s not obvious to a lot of observers how the commitments that are spelled out in Phase 1 are even going to be enforced. And this missing piece reveals a much larger point about the Trump administration — namely, its deep hostility towards international cooperation.
As Alex Pascal wrote in The Atlantic in 2019, the United States largely built the world of international institutions — the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and more — that Trump is rebelling against. This approach is generally called “multilateralism,” meaning deals that involve a whole bunch of countries at the same time. It’s been enthusiastically embraced by much of the U.S. establishment in the last few decades, including President Obama and his administration. But Trump and his team prefer “unilateralism” or “bilateralism” — America going it alone, or making piecemeal deals with one other country at a time.
Of course, multilateralism inherently requires every country to voluntary restrain itself and give up some sovereignty to that network of international institutions, who make decisions that bind all the member countries. “The United States had to follow the same rules as everyone else, even though it was the most powerful country,” as Pascal put it. Champions of multilateralism argue binding enhances trust, and thus cooperation, which led to “an unprecedented era of relative global peace and prosperity.”
Trump and his White House don’t agree with this calculus, needless to say. “Multilateralism regulates hubris,” as former-President Obama once observed. And Trump certainly doesn’t seem like a leader who appreciates having his hubris regulated. Less flippantly, the people who make up Trump’s team are bound together by a vague agreement that multilateralism and its attendant constraints have not served American interests well.
This gets us back to enforcement in the new trade deal with China. Enforcement of a deal, pretty much by definition, requires all parties to bind themselves to certain rules, and to submit to judgments imposed upon them. If one party is accused of violating the agreement — if, say, the U.S feels China isn’t living up to its obligation to buy enough American exports — it’s unlikely that both sides will agree there’s a violation occurring. Thus there must be some process for adjudicating the dispute, and some final authority identified by the deal who can render a judgment the parties agree to submit themselves to. The new trade deal with China is unusual in that it lacks this piece.
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