This Is Not a New Normal. It’s Just the Old Normal Making a Comeback
States have been fighting trade wars as long as there have been states, trade, and wars.
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About the Author
“Craig VanGrasstek,” according to The Economist (January 22, 2000), “keeps a sharp eye on the politics of trade.” He worked in this field for more than thirty years before he turned to writing its history.
Dr. VanGrasstek has been a trade consultant since 1982, and headed Washington Trade Reports since 1985. The firm’s clients include corporations, government agencies, and such international organizations as the World Trade Organization, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, and the World Bank. Dr. VanGrasstek has worked in over three dozen countries in five continents.
Dr. VanGrasstek received his doctorate in Politics from Princeton University in 1997. He also holds the degree of Master of Science in Foreign Service from Georgetown University (1983), and received a bachelor’s degree in International Relations from the University of Minnesota (1981). He taught trade policy at the American University’s School of International Service (1994-2001) and at the Harvard Kennedy School (2000-2022), as well as an innovative course on the fiction of foreign policy at Georgetown University and the Foreign Service Institute. He has also lectured at other universities, in the diplomatic academies of the United States and other countries, and at numerous training courses and seminars.
The History and Future of the World Trade Organization
The WTO’s official history was written under a cloud, at a time when trade specialists already had declining faith in the organization and the opportunity it presented. This is obliquely acknowledged in the third and fourth words of the title: The History and Future of the World Trade Organization (2013). Simply declaring that this body still had a future would not make it so, however, and it would have been intellectually dishonest not to take note of the challenges.
The theory of hegemonic stability frames the analysis. “But for the actions of two successive hegemons, each of which employed their power to create and maintain a regime of market-opening trade agreements,” as declared at the start, “it is doubtful that the legal and economic ideas on which the multilateral trading system is based would ever have moved beyond speculation and into practice.” The conclusions warned that a leading problem “that international society faces in this first half of the twenty-first century is how to handle a multilateral trading system in which there is no longer a clear hegemon,” and while the “facile solution would be to rely on the democracy of nations … to understand and act upon their shared interest in maintaining a system of open markets” that would demand “a great deal of sovereign and self-interested states.”
The book is available at https://www.wto-ilibrary.org/content/books/9789287042347#chapters
Trade and American Leadership
Systemic concerns only worsened when the United States transitioned from the system’s weary leader to its glowering disruptor. The first election of Donald Trump, and the chaos that followed, inspired Trade and American Leadership (2019).
Much of that book explains how the original proponents of the theory of hegemonic stability correctly identified the risks posed by reliance on one state’s continued competitiveness, even if they failed to anticipate how that state could postpone the showdown. They did not know that presidents Reagan through Obama would hold off the reckoning by making a series of strategic and tactical adjustments designed to accommodate the system to the American economy’s shifting interests, such as introducing the “new issues” of trade as services, investment, and intellectual property rights while also shifting to bilateral agreements.
That process eventually played out, then stalled, before Trump’s first election threw it into reverse. While no one could yet be sure whether his remaking of U.S. policy was a temporary aberration, even after he left office the signs were not good for restoration of the status quo ante.
The principal distinction between this book and its successor concerns the emphases placed on the domestic politics of trade. Those are far more prevalent in Trade and American Leadership than in On Trade War. The former book can be purchased from Cambridge University Press, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble (among others).
