I have, I must confess, not studied Brexit. Seceding seemed like a poor choice a priori, but a pretty straightforward process once undertaken: disengage from the regulatory regime in Brussels, negotiate a trade deal with the EU equivalent to that of the 36 other trade agreements the EU has negotiated, and finally, actively negotiate comparable
Robert A. Rogowsky, Professor, Trade & Economic Diplomacy, Middlebury Institute of International Studies Adj. Professor, Georgetown University School of Foreign Service The inconvenient truth about a Trade War is that you actually have to pay for it as you go. The weapons of a trade war—restricting our own desires to buy a trading partner’s goods
As we daily explore the consequences of discombobulation diplomacy—of which an important subset is what Ed Luce has exquisitely labeled “diplotainment”—we plumb ever deeper levels of concern for America’s future, for Pax Americana, and for the liberal order in general. China, we hear regularly is playing ‘the long game.’ The United States does not seem
U.S. industry in general has been strongly supportive of trade liberalization. There are, of course, a few exceptions, like steel, textiles and footwear, and a few select agricultural products. And I do mean a few. One Ag expert once told my trade class that if it’s white, it’s protected: sugar, cotton, milk, and rice. Everything
A trade war is a weird kind of war. We think of war as sending warriors and ordinance somewhere else to destroy a lot of people and stuff “over there,” to fight until finally someone gives up. Trade “war” is different because the weapons are different: trade barriers are imposed aggressively against another trading partner
Discombobulate, (Oxford Dictionary): Verb: Confuse or disconcert. Synonyms: astonish, dumbfound, stagger, startle, stun, stupefy, daze. I am steadily drawn back to these descriptors as I try to parse U.S. trade policy. Frankly, I was confused during the campaign. I hit disconcerted shortly after the election. I quickly passed astonished. I am well into dumbfounded and,
The past week was a busy one in trade. The NAFTA negotiations faltered and seem to have missed their U.S. domestic deadline. Hearings on the Section 301 action allowed scores of special interests to make their case for either imposing or not imposing scores of particular tariffs. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross publically lamented that
When Richard Nixon flew to Beijing in 1972 to open relations with China, he famously sketched out some simple answers to two basic questions: What does China want? What do we (the United States) want? Those same questions loom heavily now. The recent trip by Secretary Mnuchin and six other top U.S. official, which fell
Economic Diplomacy Blog April 27, 2018. The war on trade is settling into a new phase. Hard lines of trade are being drawn and will increasingly test the capacity, and durability, of the World Trade Organization (WTO), set up to administer the rules-based trading system. In most ways, the WTO system is showing itself robust
The ominous drumbeats of a trade war underscore the critical juncture of US-China relations. It is a good example of, what business theorists call coopetition—the complex game of competing and cooperation at the same time. An illustrative example might be Samsung-Apple’s dog-eat-dog global competition in smartphones and patent litigation, while maintaining a supportive and lucrative
