Trump just may be what international trade needs

When I talk to people about the president’s trade policy, I run into an unexpected response: What if he’s right? What if normal diplomatic pathways are so ossified that a sledgehammer approach is the only way to produce meaningful change?

On China, the president is sticking it to a country that in the public’s mind clearly deserved to be stuck. His confrontational style, annoying on a personal level, could work where previous, softer, approaches have not. Likewise on NAFTA and steel and aluminum tariffs, people see him as a disruptive force that might be just what the trading system needs.

This is a hard pill for the swamp to swallow, and it is too soon to say whether it will have to. The administration has only completed one trade negotiation — with South Korea — and that had, at best, a modest outcome for the United States. While it began with the usual bluster and bullying that are now so familiar, it ended surprisingly quietly with a conventional agreement involving market access concessions. NAFTA could play out the same way, and there is no doubt that the Chinese are trying to do the same thing.

OUR VIEW: There is no method to his apparent madness

This suggests what the president regularly points out: When the U.S. wants to throw its weight around, it still has plenty of heft to do it. We are a large economy and people want to do business with us, so we have leverage.

This approach may produce short-term gains, but it may also produce long-term costs, both economic (disrupted supply chains and new ones that are more expensive and make us less competitive) and political (weakened multilateral institutions and irritated allies that will not be there for us when we need them).

But, under the circumstances, it would be smart for us cynics not to ignore the little voice saying, “Maybe he’s right.”

Time will tell, but we should not rule it out, however painful that might be.

William Alan Reinsch is an international business expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

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