The Trump Administration's Legacy in the Regime Complex for International Trade

• In Event: Evolution of International Regime Complexes: Adaptation and Maladaptation

Abstract

International trade is subject to a notoriously elaborate regime complex, with a strong but increasingly beleaguered World Trade Organization joined by a growing number of preferential trading agreements. The increasing complexity of global trade governance has been explained largely as a result of endogenous factors, such as the paralysis of WTO multilateral negotiations and the creation of “losers” from global trade, but this paper focuses on an exogenous shock to the system, namely the dramatic shift of US trade policy during the Trump Administration (2017-2021). During his four years in office, Trump attacked the WTO and paralyzed its dispute settlement system; forced the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement; and rejected the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Taken together, the effect of these policies has been to weaken substantially the focal WTO regime while removing the US from the renamed CPTPP, thereby providing new incentives for institutional proliferation, most notably in the case of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework. A Democratic US administration would have been unlikely to undertake these actions, yet the transition back to the Biden administration has not reversed any of these decisions, which have endured in a path-dependent fashion due to high domestic and international costs of reversion to the status quo ante. The result is a weaker and more fragmented regime complex for international trade.

Author

• Mark A. Pollack, Temple University