U.S. trade policy in the age of Trump: What role for Europe in the “New Nationalism”?

Peter S. Rashish

Vice President; Director, Geoeconomics Program

Peter S. Rashish, who counts over 30 years of experience counseling corporations, think tanks, foundations, and international organizations on transatlantic trade and economic strategy, is Vice President and Director of the Geoeconomics Program at AICGS. He also writes The Wider Atlantic blog.

Mr. Rashish has served as Vice President for Europe and Eurasia at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, where he spearheaded the Chamber’s advocacy ahead of the launch of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. Previously, Mr. Rashish was a Senior Advisor for Europe at McLarty Associates, Executive Vice President of the European Institute, and a staff member and consultant at the International Energy Agency, the World Bank, UNCTAD, the Atlantic Council, the Bertelsmann Foundation, and the German Marshall Fund.

Mr. Rashish has testified before the House Financial Services Subcommittee on International Monetary Policy and Trade and the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe and Eurasia and has advised three U.S. presidential campaigns. He has been a featured speaker at the Munich Security Conference, the Aspen Ideas Festival, and the Salzburg Global Seminar and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Jean Monnet Institute in Paris and a Senior Advisor to the European Policy Centre in Brussels. His commentaries have been published in The New York Times, the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, and The National Interest, and he has appeared on PBS, CNBC, CNN, and NPR.

He earned a BA from Harvard College and an MPhil in international relations from Oxford University. He speaks French, German, Italian, and Spanish.

One year ago, the American public elected in Donald Trump a president who painted international trade not as a generator of U.S. prosperity and a multiplier of its national interest, but as a set of bargains sapping the U.S. of jobs, prosperity, and power. As one of the U.S.’ major trading partners, this could have consequences for the EU as well. The upcoming NAFTA renegotiations will be a good indicator of how the Trump administration would approach a trade negotiation with the EU. If the Union is serious about its long-term commitment to multilateralism, cooperation on the nuts and bolts of trade policy with the U.S. will need to be part of the order of the day. There are several possible ways to go about this:

• Reviving the stalled TTIP negotiations, perhaps under a new name and with new content.
• Finding overlapping interests that can provide the basis for case-by-case policy cooperation, especially on issues that either directly or indirectly involve China (screening of foreign investment, China’s non-market economy status in the WTO, intellectual property, trade defense instruments like anti-dumping and countervailing duties, or the role of state-owned enterprises in international trade).
• The U.S. administration will need to move beyond a focus on eliminating unfairness that it believes is built into existing trade arrangements to a more forward-looking approach.
• The EU, for its part, will need to overcome any hesitations it has about cooperating with a US administration that does not appear to share its core trade-policy convictions.

This article was published on November 13, 2017, by the European Policy Centre. Click here to download this publication.