Trade

Outside voices: Measuring, skeptically, the Biden trade agenda
November 10, 2023 at 8:00 AM
“Count me skeptical,” writes Mark Linscott, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center, about potential for the administration’s “signature effort in Asia,” the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity, to deliver on its promises “to fill the vacuum left by abandonment of what is now the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership.”

In recent years, global trade relationships have shifted substantially, in many ways reversing a decades-long multilateral drive toward more open trade. I know how dizzying these shifts have been from my own experience as a US trade negotiator over the past three decades. It’s too early to tell whether these shifts are a temporary setback or, instead, a terminus for the multilateral trading system, but it’s not too soon to assess how US policies are faring amid these changes.