Tyler Cowen, Columnist

Bilateral Trade Deals Can Work, If Your Name Isn’t Trump

Big free-trade agreements are inevitably a mess. But who trusts this U.S. president to sit down one-on-one?

June 21, 2018 at 7:00 AM UTC

Tyler Cowen is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a professor of economics at George Mason University and host of the Marginal Revolution blog.

Get tough.
Photographer: Artyom Ivanov/TASS/Getty Images

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One of the most fascinating moments in recent negotiations came when U.S. President Donald Trump offered complete free trade to his European partners at the Group of Seven meetings. Trump may have viewed this as a public relations ploy, but the response was still striking: No major European political leader embraced the idea. Nor did China.

So how to make further progress on trade? Well, Trump on Monday threatened China with an extra $200 billion in tariffs, thereby moving back to bilateral pressures. The popular tendency is to condemn this bilateralism, but I don’t think it’s so simple.