The deep continuity in US Trade Policy between administrations (Obama, Trump, Biden)

In May 2021, I presented to a teleconference held in Le Havre, France, a paper underlining the deep continuities between Democrat and Republican US administrations in trade policies. 

The article appeared as "Continuity and Change in US Trade Policy Towards China and Beyond" in a collective volume of  Amandine CAYOL, Hye-Hwal SEONG, Remus TITIRIGA, Pierre CHABAL (eds.) Eurasian challenges to international economic law after BREXIT and in the context of the COVID-19, Peter Lang, Brussels, visible also at https://ssrn.com/abstract=4023085

The purpose of the paper was to determine whether the disruptive trade actions of the Trump administration concerning Eurasia and China would be pursued by the Biden admin­istration.

Trump administration followed within a crescendo the antidumping and countervailing duties favoured already in the last years by President Obama.

The Trump administration also took a bolder stance in using different US legal instruments (out of WTO but not forbidden by WTO) to adopt trade sanctions against China and other countries. However, according to expert commenters, a Hillary Presidency would have also used such mechanisms, albeit under different rhetoric. 

There was also a continuity in the escalation of US actions inside the WTO from Obama to Trump, who finally blocked the Appellate Body dispute settle­ment.

Given such deep continuities, I considered that the trade war with tariffs and sanctions on China adopted by the Trump administration will remain in place for the time being under the Biden administration.

The reshaping of Global Trade by the Administration of President Trump

During the last 4 years, I watched closely the International Trade actions adopted by US President Trump. That attention materialized in 2 successive articles evaluating these actions and their probable impact on Global economic relations. 

A first article analyzed developments before June 2018, when it was presented to a conference in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, followed by a recent publication in a collective volume (The 'fair-trade strategy' of the new U.S. administration concerning China in "Cross-border exchanges: Eurasian perspectives on logistics and diplomacy," Peter Lang, Brussels, 2020). It is available at https://ssrn.com/abstract=3648057

It focused on the Trump Administration's trade initiatives about China framed in the American push for restructuring the global economic order.

The first section considered President Trump's business background to explain his economic focus and non-conventional economic policy and policy approach in general. Allying this with an assessment of the US economic and geopolitical position, I identified the patterns, directions, strategies, resources, and capabilities in the service of international trade policies.
The second section examined the trade actions of the US Administration regarding China. We applied patterns identified in the first part to understand the logic of American trade actions and evaluate their possible outcomes.

The following article analyzed developments before June 2019, as an update of a presentation made in April 2019 to a conference in Almaty, Kazakhstan. 
It analyzed the Trump Administration's trade policies with Eurasian state or non-state actors and will soon be published (Globalization 2.0? Legal implications for Eurasia of the new US trade-policies in "The Belt-and-Road initiative and the challenge of change in the legal and political systems of Eurasia," Peter Lang, Enjeux Internationaux, Brussels, 2021). It is available at https://ssrn.com/abstract=3648866 

The introduction assessed the new US trade policy's goals and tools through President Trump's open declarations. The first section identified the trade policy's strategies/tactics by analyzing the new US administration's actions, such as the tariffs on aluminum and steel or the renegotiation of KORUS or USMCA agreements.

A second section used this frame to apprehend the US Administration's trade actions concerning actors, such as the EU, Japan, China, or WTO, and determine the possible outcomes with disruptive impact on the last three decades' globalization process.

We estimate that the US administration's international trade policies will have a more consequential impact on global order than the Soviet Union's fall in the 90s.