Trump’s Foreign Policy and International Trade Law

Résumé 0

: Donald Trump has based his Foreign Policy in the area of international trade on two main objectives. The first one seeks to promote “fair trade” in order to bring down trade deficits, restore reciprocity and balance in the trade relations of the United States with its trading partners and defend American commercial interests against and/or beyond other countries interests. On the second place, Trump´s Foreign Policy intends to stop the de-location of productive activities from the United States and create new jobs to foster a strong and growing domestic economy. The concrete fulfilment of these objectives have shaken deeply the most central foundations of International Trade Law: a normative system build after the Second World War to give legal basis and regulate the economic relations between states in the new international liberal order. In the first place, Trump´s Foreign Policy´s neo-protectionism represents a frontal attack on free trade, as a dominant paradigm of International Trade Law. In the second place, the avowed bilateralism of this Policy is the exact opposite of the multilateralism, promoted by the norms and institutions of International Trade Law. Both neo-protectionism and bilateralism manifest a broader crisis of States’ cooperation in the Post-World War II international liberal order.