Trade Archive

Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador was elected last year after promising to tackle corruption and inequality and improve conditions for Mexican workers. So it was little surprise that one of his first acts upon taking office in late 2018 was to raise the minimum wage. AMLO, as the president is known, also had his advisers join the team renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement and encourage the acceptance of U.S. demands to embed key labor law reforms in an updated deal. The result was an annex to the labor chapter in the new NAFTA 2.0—which President Donald Trump […]

In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, Mira Rapp-Hooper and Rebecca Friedman Lissner make a compelling case for a more restrained U.S. foreign policy. The United States, they write, should abandon messianic liberal internationalism for the more realistic goal of an open world. Such a prudent policy has a lot to recommend it. It would also take America back to the future—to the grand strategy that President Franklin D. Roosevelt endorsed during World War II. As I argued in my 2009 book “The Best Laid Plans: The Origins of American Multilateralism and the Dawn of the Cold War,” it was […]

China’s voracious appetite for new nuclear power plants has helped to slow the decline in recent years of an ailing nuclear energy industry long dominated by the United States and Europe. From a late and inauspicious start in the 1990s, China’s nuclear fleet has risen to become the world’s third largest. According to Chinese government projections, within the next decade China may surpass the United States as the world’s leading nuclear energy producer. Despite that growth, though, China is increasingly viewed less as the salvation of the Western nuclear power industry, and more as a competitive threat. Chinese companies have […]

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un made his first trip to Russia this week for a long-anticipated summit with President Vladimir Putin. Kim traveled by train to the far eastern port city of Vladivostok, about 75 miles from the North Korean border, where he and Putin met Thursday and discussed the North Korean nuclear issue, as well as bilateral economic engagement. It was the first meeting between the two leaders since Kim rose to power in 2011, although Putin is acquainted with the Kim family dynasty. He previously met with the young dictator’s father, Kim Jong Il, three times in […]

Until Jan. 23, 2017, the United States had a major free trade agreement with Japan and 10 other countries called the Trans-Pacific Partnership. But on his first day in office, President Donald Trump withdrew from the TPP, which had been signed just a few months earlier by President Barack Obama as his signature piece of trade policy. Trump was fulfilling one of his first campaign promises, having railed against the deal for years. At the signing of his Executive Order pulling the U.S. out of the TPP, Trump declared that it was a “great thing for the American worker, what […]

As part of his ongoing tirade against immigration, President Donald Trump has threatened to shut down the southern border completely. First, he said he would take action if Mexico doesn’t stop the flow of migrants; later, his demand was Mexico ending drug trafficking. Maybe it is both, though neither is feasible. When there was a hue and cry about the extreme disruption that would ensue from closing the border, Trump retreated, saying he would give the Mexican government a year to meet his demands before taking any action. He also downplayed that threat and raised the specter of imposing a […]

President Donald Trump likes to claim that the tariffs he has imposed on steel, aluminum, washing machines, solar panels and a variety of other imports are forcing foreigners to pay for the privilege of selling their goods in the American market. But what does the data say? Are American firms and consumers in fact paying the price? Two new empirical studies shed light on the answer, and, unfortunately for the president, neither one supports his position. The authors of these studies have carefully parsed the data and analyzed the distribution of the tariffs’ costs—internationally and among various groups and regions […]