From the end of the Second World War through the end of the Barack Obama administration, the meaning of U.S. leadership on trade was pretty clear: negotiating agreements to open markets in any country that was willing to do so. However, its definition is far from clear today. The administration of President Joe Biden has tried out approaches that put trade in the service of fighting climate change, empowering workers, discouraging monopolies, embracing U.S. allies, sanctioning Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, curbing Chinese influence, and bolstering U.S. manufacturing. But in the election year of 2024, that complex structure looks at risk of crashing from the weight of its own ambitions. 

U.S. trade policy was once fairly simple. Following the powerful insights of British political economist David Ricardo, countries that opened their markets to trade and investment by exporting what they produced best (and importing the rest) saw enormous—and largely shared—gains in wealth. The United States, with a huge consumer market and a slew of competitive multinational companies, considered itself a big winner from trade liberalization and encouraged agreements of every shape and size. As an added bonus, opening the U.S. market to imports helped to strengthen political alliances around the world. The job of American political leaders, therefore, was to keep negotiating trade agreements that provided ever more market opportunities for the United States and for other countries. It was a classic, and rare, win-win. 

One version of U.S. leadership on trade calls for restoring that old model by launching new negotiations in Asia or Latin America that would further reduce tariffs or regulatory impediments to trade. Even if that were politically possible—and with the Republican Party under Donald Trump abandoning its support for free trade it is almost certainly not—the case for restoration is weak. With tariffs already at historic lows, the gains from further market-access negotiations are likely to be small. More importantly, restoration would not tackle any of the biggest contemporary challenges: accelerating the transition to green technologies, lifting stagnant wages, containing the risks of artificial intelligences, and maintaining power balances that discourage conflicts in Europe and Asia. 

Finding balance in Biden’s broad trade agenda

The Biden team should be applauded for experimenting with different formulations in its efforts to restore U.S. leadership that so badly eroded in the Trump years. Those efforts include U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai’s worker-centered trade policy, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan’s “small yards, high fences” approach for controlling technology trade with China, and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s friendshoring strategy for including allies in the clean energy supply chain. All represent serious efforts to build a trade policy for a more complex world. 

But the Biden administration has yet to grapple with the contradictions among those different approaches. Take the recent $14.1 billion bid by Japan’s Nippon Steel to purchase U.S. Steel, the Pittsburgh-based Industrial Age icon. On friendshoring grounds, Japan is a critical ally and blocking the acquisition would seem wholly unjustified. On clean energy grounds, steel companies are struggling to meet new EU requirements, which favor cleaner steel over products made with dirty carbon emissions; new investments from Nippon Steel could help to make the United States a global leader. But Biden has come out against the acquisition on “worker-centered grounds,” the United Steelworkers union opposes the deal, and Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH), who is in a tough reelection fight in a right-leaning state, says the deal would weaken trade enforcement. 

Or consider the likelihood of new tariffs on imports of solar panels from Southeast Asia. Both the Obama and Trump administrations put tariffs on panel imports from China, which are heavily subsidized by the Chinese government in violation of U.S. trade laws. Those tariffs shifted panel production to several Southeast Asian countries that are important to the United States, including Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam. Some of that production is likely Chinese-made panels being shipped through the region, and the Commerce Department last year ruled that those products should face import tariffs, too. 

But the Biden administration has suspended any collection of those tariffs until June as part of a two-year moratorium on new tariffs meant to keep down the costs of solar panels and encourage more Americans to install them on their homes. Solar panels from Southeast Asia (or China for that matter) pose no security threats, help the economies of U.S. allies, and encourage a quicker U.S. transition away from dirty energy. But the lower cost of imports also discourages American manufacturing, costing jobs in panel production (even as it increases jobs in installation). Senator Brown, along with Democratic senators from Georgia—a critical electoral state—are calling for the tariffs to be imposed. The president seems likely to comply. 

All of these scenarios could be seen as the inevitable conflicts that emerge bodog poker review when trying to design new trade policies for a complex world. But one of the requirements of economic leadership is that countries should be seen as at least occasionally paying a price for their principles. In the free-trade era, the United States made politically unpopular decisions to lift import barriers in sectors such as textiles and apparel, and often complied with difficult rulings made by the now-neutered dispute-settlement panels of the World Trade Organization. 

The biggest challenge for U.S. trade policy today is to acknowledge those trade-offs and find consistent approaches to resolving the contradictions. This could be too much to expect of the Biden administration in an election year, especially given the dangerous alternative. But until firmer ground can be found, U.S. claims for renewed leadership on trade will continue to ring hollow.  

To read the full article as it appears on the Council on Foreign Relations’ website, click here. 

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As President-elect Joe Biden prepares to take office, trade policy may be primed to recede to the background. The incoming administration isn’t likely to continue waging many of the trade conflicts Trump has initiated—especially the trade spats targeting our allies—but neither will the liberalization locomotive be back in full gear: Today, neither party is especially enthusiastic about negotiating sweeping new trade agreements. As a pair of popular trade policy podcasters put it, Biden is primed to “Make Trade Boring Again.” And overall, that might be a good thing.

But there is at least one area where the incoming Biden administration should launch new, ambitious negotiations: digital trade. Digital trade is about goods and services being bought, sold, and delivered electronically. It’s a U.S. cybersecurity company helping protect a Finnish company’s networks; it’s a Brazilian farmer getting real-time insights on weather conditions and agricultural markets from a Japanese data analytics company; it’s a factory on the shores of Lake Erie sending streams of data around the world so that artificial intelligence can identify maintenance issues before anything breaks down. The United States is the world’s leading exporter of services—more and more of which are delivered digitally—so the commercial value of an open, global internet and a fair, global market for such services should be obvious.

A forward-looking digital trade agreement would guarantee that all these services and more can compete internationally—and that the data upon which they depend can flow freely across borders. Successfully negotiating such an agreement with a large group of trading partners would be a boon to U.S. businesses and workers, and there is every reason to believe it would be a political winner on both sides of the aisle.

What is more, it would also advance the geostrategic interests of the United States. An agreement that helps ensure the global digital economy defaults toward free commerce, the free exchange of ideas, and the free flow of data will help the United States and its allies confront and compete with China. At home, the Chinese government has implemented a top-down, repressive model for controlling the internet. And it has used negotiations, influence, and raw power to advocate this model overseas—seeking to build a coalition of countries with separate, sovereign internets characterized by greater government control over information—in order to validate its domestic approach and enhance its global influence.

The campaign is working: Governments around the world have followed China’s lead by restricting the free flow of information, blocking online services, and fragmenting the internet along national boundaries. Earlier this year, Freedom House documented a 10^th consecutive year of decline in global “internet freedom,” and the U.S. trade representative cataloged an ever-growing list of barriers to digital trade. It is not enough for the United States to play defense against these efforts—the Biden administration should advance a proactive strategy to ensure an open, global internet with rules that are rooted in democratic values.

One of the most effective ways the Biden administration can pursue this goal is by negotiating enforceable rules and commitments on digital trade that bind together a large group of countries with shared values and common interests. A digital trade agreement should be built around rules that guarantee the free flow of data, prohibit data localization requirements, and ban unfair policies that discriminate against foreign digital products and services.

The fruits of a digital trade agreement wouldn’t just accrue to giant tech companies: Digital trade is fundamentally about the cross-border movement of data, and businesses big and small, across a wide range of sectors need to move data across borders to reach customers, operate efficiently, and compete globally. To help ensure they benefit, a digital trade agreement should also include commitments by governments to allow service suppliers to access foreign markets and compete on a level playing field. Establishing a large Bodog Poker open market for service suppliers would help counteract the unfair advantages China provides its own firms.

Over the past three years, a growing group at the World Trade Organization has been negotiating on digital trade. Many countries have engaged in good faith, but the participation of China, Russia, and other authoritarian governments makes a useful outcome unlikely. China, for one, has used the negotiation to advocate its “internet sovereignty” and oppose meaningful rules on core issues. This negotiation has, however, highlighted broad interest in defining rules to govern digital trade, including among many countries that share the United States’ democratic values.

A digital trade negotiation should be open to any government that shares a genuine interest in a free, fair, global digital economy and a willingness to abide by enforceable, high-standard rules. This inclusiveness will help ensure that the agreement expands the bloc of countries committed to liberal digital governance, rather than ceding large swaths of the globe to China’s influence. The negotiation toward a “Trade in Services Agreement,” which stalled in 2016, could provide a useful foundation for negotiations and good starter list of countries that may be eager to engage.

While a digital trade negotiation would avoid some of the trickiest areas in trade, such as agriculture and intellectual property, the intersection between cross-border data flows and data privacy has proven contentious in previous negotiations, such as the discontinued Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership negotiations between the United States and European Union. But that is no reason to avoid the issue. In fact, negotiators should aim to go further than past agreements and set standards for the protection of consumers and their personal data. Ensuring effective and compatible data privacy regimes in participating countries would help assuage concerns about the free flow of information among them. Passing a federal data privacy law would make it much easier for the United States to negotiate data protection standards and help establish a democratic model for digital privacy.

Rules to govern the global digital economy will be written in the coming years. Who writes them—and whether they favor an open, global digital economy or one that is top-down and closed—will have an outsize impact on power and politics in the 21^st century. The Biden administration shouldn’t wait to begin negotiating toward an open digital future.

Sam duPont is the deputy director of GMF Digital at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. He previously served as director for digital trade at the Office of the United States Trade Representative.

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On day one, President Biden and the Congress will confront a range of difficult transnational challenges. A few, like ongoing wars in Syria, Yemen, Libya, are security issues that must first be addressed by the Department of Defense. But the wider range of issues—COVID-19, global economic contraction, climate change, retrenchment in democracy, historic levels of refugees and migration, humanitarian crises, social and economic inequities, terrorism—can be addressed only by the two D’s of diplomacy and development—with a heavy responsibility on the latter. I presented many of these ideas in a recent paper.

‘Givens’

The question is what should the American people expect from the new president on development in addressing these challenges—and opportunities? We can be fairly certain from his track record and stated commitments that President Biden will seek to renew trust in American international engagement and leadership through a series of initial actions. They include:

• Support for robust funding for the International Affairs Budget.
• A commitment to working as a collaborative partner and supporter of international organizations and alliances such as rejoining the Paris Climate Accord and the World Health Organization (WHO), supporting the consensus candidate for Secretary-General and appointment of judges to the dispute panel of the World Trade Organization (WTO), engaging in multilateral/multiparty efforts to address regional and global problems, and seeking consensus with our allies.
• Nominate a Secretary of State and leaders for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), U.S. Development Finance Corporation (DFC), and Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) who bring relevant experience, expertise, and commitment to the strategic and effective use of U.S. development, cooperation, and respect for the dedicated and talented career staff responsible for advancing U.S. development and diplomatic interests in the world.
• A concern for social and economic equity, with an immediate reversal of the Mexico City policy, the recent suspension of trainings on equity and diversity, and the regressive draft USAID policy on gender.
• Design and implementation of strategic initiatives, including:
  • An interagency plan led by USAID for addressing the global health pandemic that encompasses U.S. and multilateral approaches to stemming the tide of COVID-19, including through participation in the ACT-Accelerator to accelerated development and delivery of vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics, and prepares developing bodog casino countries to contain the next pandemic.
  • Incorporation of climate change actions into U.S. development cooperation policies and programs.
  • Alignment of U.S. development policy objectives and assessment of impact with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
  • A multinational/multiparty digital initiative (akin to Power Africa)—made even more urgent by COVID-19 demonstrating the centrality of digital technology to health, education, and employment—that leapfrogs the benefits of the digital world to developing countries, including digital literacy and efficient/cost-effective infrastructure and 5G, while providing protection against nefarious use of information technology.
• Listen to the views and recommendations of senior political and career appointments, and other stakeholders and allies, treating them with respect and providing clear, consistent policies; and replacing at international/multilateral organizations U.S. appointees who are not reflective of the values of international partnering and equity.
• Establish a collaborative, locally-driven approach to dealing with fragility and building resilience through effective implementation of the Global Development Act.
• Fully staff USAID to its funded level.

’Incremental’

So, if these are some of the starting points that are “givens,” what are “incremental” steps the Biden presidency could take quickly to elevate development with the stature and authority needed to fully address global development issues? They are:

• Assign the Administrator of USAID cabinet rank (as some presidents have done for the U.N. Ambassador and the trade representative).
• Make USAID a permanent member of the National Security Council (NSC) so the development perspective has a voice in the range of issues that touch on development—for example, development isn’t usually a prime consideration when authorizing military action, but it should be as it is development practitioners and diplomats who bear responsibility for the aftermath.
• Assign USAID full authority for the budgets it manages—made real by gaining congressional consent for the merger of policy and budget into the proposed new Bureau of Policy, Resources and Performance with a Senate-confirmed leader—and reign in the mission creep of F (the State Department Office of Foreign Assistance) for its unproductive interference in USAID program implementation.
• Direct an assessment of the level of staffing that USAID should reach to be able to appropriately manage its budgets and policy responsibilities (including in interagency councils) and (like the military) maintain a 10 percent float for professional career development.
• Issue a global development policy to bring coherence across the interagency to policies and programs of development cooperation, foreign assistance, and international economic policy, constructed through interagency deliberations led by USAID and the NSC in consultation with the Congress and the broader development and foreign policy communities.
• Engage with international initiatives to address the burgeoning debt crisis of developing countries, including through providing greater liquidity through emergency issuance of SDRs.
• Empower the leadership of the DFC to fully implement the development mandate of the BUILD Act, including: placing priority on supporting investments in low-income and fragile environments and on assessing and reporting on the development impact of projects; reducing the budget impact of equity finance by bringing it under the purview of credit reform; and, catalyzing collaboration among the DFC, USAID, and other agencies.

‘Visionary’

Beyond the “given” and the “incremental,” what about the “visionary and ambitious”? What if averting future pandemics, the existential threat of climate change, the growing social and economic equities within and between countries, rising authoritarianism, the destabilizing effect of Chinese challenge to U.S. global leadership and established international norms are understood by the new President, his key advisers, and congressional leaders as creating a moment in time that demands more than just incremental improvement? What if this is viewed as another 9/11 moment, or a post-World War II opportunity, and development is acknowledged as central to re-envisioning U.S. global engagement?

The first step would be to bring together the key actors—the President’s national security team with leaders from the two foreign affairs authorizing and appropriations committees—to determine if there is sufficient consensus that the urgency of global challenges to U.S. interests demands more than business as usual, that elevating development is central to answering the challenges, and that they are prepared to collaborate on redesigning and upgrading U.S. tools of development. Among the options that should be on the table are:

• Strategy. Modeled on the Defense Department quadrennial security strategy, undertake separate diplomacy and development strategic reviews that, along with the defense review, would roll up into a U.S. Global Strategy, which Congress should mandate be undertaken every four years.
• Department of Global Development. As President Kennedy did with the creation of USAID in 1961, bring coherence to U.S. development cooperation policies and programs through consolidation of development activities (bilateral and multilateral) in a cabinet-level department, in a manner that (1) incorporates into our development endeavors the diplomatic and regional knowledge of the Department of State, the technical expertise of domestic agencies, and the broad community of private stakeholders and (2) maintains the brands and principal operating modalities of certain agencies and programs, such as the MCC and DFC.
• Global Development Act. Replace the 60-year-old Foreign Assistance Act of 1961—with its hundreds of pages of amendments and overlapping/ inconsistent/constraining barnacles—with a less cumbersome, updated statute that provides strategic coherence, nimbleness of action, and clear accountability.
• Personnel. Design a personnel system for development that fits agency needs and the personnel dynamics of the 21st century.
• Multilateralism fit for the 21st century. Use the U.S. position in multilateral/regional development institutions and vertical funds to address 21st century challenges—climate change, health and education, mass migration, growing debt problem, and state and community fragility and resilience.
• Marshall Plan on Sustainable Development. Initiate an international Marshall Plan that joins American domestic and international efforts in a multiparty global endeavor to advance sustainable development that ramps up investment along its interconnected elements—green infrastructure, health, education, conservation of land and water, and justice and equity.

President Biden and his team face the options of incremental improvement or ambitious innovation—each approach has its own benefits and deficiencies—but, the more ambitious better fits with U.S. history of responding to moments of international crisis and will better  serve U.S. global leadership for decades rather than several years.

To read the original blog post, please click here.

George Ingram is a senior fellow in the Center for Sustainable Development, housed in the Global Economy and Development program at Brookings.

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Business leaders should keep in mind that the trans-Pacific trade war hasn’t curtailed export shipments to the degree many feared. As The Wall Street Journal reported recently, China’s exports to the U.S. were down by only 3.6% in the first eight months of 2020, even while global trade was being thrown for a loop by coronavirus lockdowns.

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As the Biden transition team begins gearing up to select the people who might staff the administration, the progressive wing of the party is pushing for appointees with deep ties to labor unions and congressional Democrats. And they are battling against appointees that they say would seek to restore a “status quo” on trade, including those with ties to corporate lobbyists, trade associations and Washington think tanks that advocate more typical trade deals.

The split is falling along familiar lines between moderates — who see trade agreements as key to American peace and prosperity — and left-wing Democrats, who blame trade deals for hurting American workers in favor of corporate interests.

The division has dogged the Democratic Party for years. President Bill Clinton and Barack Obama joined with moderate Republicans to try to lock in new trade pacts to the chagrin of labor unions and many Congressional Democrats. For Mr. Obama, that split spilled into a fight over the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a multicountry trade pact that became so politically toxic that Hillary Clinton disavowed it during her 2016 presidential campaign.

The rift helped speed the election of President Trump, who won over some blue-collar workers disaffected with the Democratic Party’s trade record by espousing a populist worldview and vowing to rewrite “job-killing” trade pacts like the North American Free Trade Agreement.

The balance of power between progressives and moderates in trade policy will be “a huge issue for the Democrats,” said Simon Lester, an expert in trade policy at the Cato Institute.

“During the campaign, you can kind of gloss over it, you can make statements in vague ways, but at a certain point you have to make decisions about personnel and about policy,” Mr. Lester said.

Mr. Biden has bridged these divisions so far in the campaign by focusing on criticizing Mr. Trump for his costly and erratic trade policy, which he says has alienated allies like Canada and Europe and failed to convince China to make significant economic reforms. Mr. Biden has emphasized broad principles that most Democrats agree on, like working with allies and investing at home to make American businesses more competitive, and he has declined to provide specifics on other policies that might divide his supporters.

In the Oct. 22 debate, Mr. Biden criticized Mr. Trump for embracing “thugs” in North Korea, China and Russia, and he said the president “pokes his finger in the eye of all of our friends, all of our allies.”

“We need to be having the rest of our friends with us, saying to China, ‘These are the rules. You play by them or you’re going to pay the price for not playing by them, economically.’” Mr. Biden said. “That’s the way I will run it.”

Some progressive Democrats have worried that Mr. Biden — who voted for NAFTA in 1993 and to pave the way to bring China into the World Trade Organization in 2000 — would put America back on the mainstream trade policy path that Mr. Obama and Mr. Clinton pursued. Many of Mr. Biden’s closest advisers are holdovers from the Obama administration, who, like Mr. Biden, believe deeply in the benefits of global economic integration.

But Mr. Biden has also done more than previous Democratic presidents to court the progressive wing of his party, pledging to give both labor unions and environmentalists a larger role in writing future trade rules. His vice-presidential pick, Senator Kamala Harris of California, has also taken a more skeptical stance on trade and was one of the few Senate Democrats to vote against the revised NAFTA agreement because it did not contain provisions on climate change.

“He’s going to, in my opinion, run a very labor-friendly administration,” said Jon Leiber, managing director for the United States at the Eurasia Group.

To help quiet any trade fights within the party, Mr. Biden has promised to first focus on domestic priorities like curbing the coronavirus pandemic, addressing climate change and investing in infrastructure and health care before writing new trade deals, signaling that the blistering pace of trade talks seen under President Trump is likely to slow.

“The thing that they realize politically is that if they want strong unity and purpose on things like Covid, infrastructure and climate, they cannot create a war between the congressional Democrats and the White House,” said Lori Wallach, the director Public Citizen’s trade watch, a progressive who has been cited as a potential trade official in a Biden administration.

Mr. Biden has papered over other difficult divisions within the Democratic Party by declining to state a position. Mr. Biden has released more extensive plans for expanding Buy American programs and proposed tax penalties for companies that send jobs overseas.

But on other policy choices, his campaign has been vague. That includes declining to say whether a Biden White House would keep the tariffs Mr. Trump imposed on $360 billion worth of Chinese goods, whether it would proceed with bans on Chinese social media sites like TikTok or WeChat or how it would resolve a standoff that has crippled the World Trade Organization. It’s unclear if a Biden administration would ultimately move to rejoin the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or continue existing trade talks with the United Kingdom and Kenya.

Mr. Biden’s advisers tend to be more unified on China, but there is still a split, people familiar with the conversations say. Some see China as a challenge, but still believe in trying to integrate the country into the global system and work with the Chinese on issues like climate change and nuclear proliferation. Others see a clash between the two systems as more inevitable, and say China’s increasingly authoritarian behavior is likely to preclude much cooperation.

Democrats are unified around some issues — like using new provisions in bodog online casino the revised North American trade agreement to push for labor reforms in Mexico, and updating trade rules to include commitments on climate change. And many Democrats support reforms at the W.T.O. that would pressure China to change its trade practices.

The path of Mr. Biden’s trade policy will depend largely on personnel decisions, including who become the Treasury Secretary, the United States Trade Representative and commerce secretary.

One of the most widely mentioned candidates for Treasury Secretary is Lael Brainard, an economist and member of the Federal Reserve’s Board who served as under secretary for international affairs at the Treasury during the Obama administration. But some congressional Democrats have pointed to Ms. Brainard’s reluctance to label countries like China as currency manipulators when she was at the Treasury, and instead are pushing for Sarah Bloom Raskin, a former Fed governor and Treasury official whom they see as more aligned with their views.

For the U.S. trade representative, progressive politicians and trade experts are pushing candidates including Katherine Tai, the chief trade counsel at the House Ways and Means Committee; Michael Wessel, a member of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission; and Tom Perriello, a former congressman from Virginia who is now executive director of Open Society-U. S., a philanthropic group, according to people familiar with the conversations.

In a sign of the challenges facing Mr. Biden, those same voices have objected to more mainstream candidates they say could return trade policy to a previous status quo, like Fred Hochberg, the former head of the U.S. Export-Import Bank or Miriam Sapiro, a trade negotiator for the Obama administration who is now at a public relations firm.

The commerce secretary, a position sometimes doled out to wealthy political donors, is also an area where progressives hope to make staffing inroads. The Commerce Department has become increasingly powerful under the Trump administration as it pursued trade cases against other nations, accusing foreign governments of unfairly subsidizing goods sold by American competitors. The department has also levied tariffs on foreign metal and is responsible for imposing sanctions against Chinese companies, including placing several big firms like Huawei on an entity list that prevents them from buying American technology and other components.

Among the names being floated for role of commerce secretary is Rohit Chopra, a commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission and an ally of Senator Elizabeth Warren who has pushed the trade commission to crack down on companies that falsely claim their products are American-made.

Some non-trade roles will also play a part in shaping policy, particularly with regard to China. Top officials in the Departments of State and Defense, as well as the National Security Council, could have outsized influence over the direction of relations with China given the growing concerns among both Democrats and Republicans about Beijing’s economic, military and technology ambitions.

Ana Swanson is based in the Washington bureau and covers trade and international economics for The New York Times.

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