Description

The “America First” trade agenda is often portrayed as a volte face in American foreign policy—a whiplash from an ethos of free trade and rules-based multilateralism to an ideology of nationalistic protectionism. This narrative should be reconsidered.

It is true that the United States long championed trade multilateralism, from the formation of the GATT (1947), to the reformation of the WTO (1994), through the Obama years. Yet it has all along insisted on maintaining and deploying a range of legal options to act unilaterally within the system. It has done so through unilateral trade remedies (anti-dumping and countervailing duties); through the procedures of multilateral dispute settlement; and through national security exceptions. Moreover, the United States has tended to invoke these rights aggressively, often as a smokescreen for outright protectionism. This history of intra-systemic law-bending paved the way for the extra-systemic lawlessness of our current moment.

This lecture will trace the unilateral streak in U.S. trade policy across three periods: (1) the long post-war period from 1947–2016, characterized by both the United States’ genuine multilateralism and an undercurrent of “American exceptionalism” in trade; (2) a transitional period from 2016–2024, marked by the United States’ increasingly aggressive recourse to (arguably) legal unilateralism and its crippling of multilateral dispute settlement; and (3) the eruption of “America First,” from 2025 on. It makes the case that the continuities in American trade policy from 1947 to the present are as important to understanding our moment as the ruptures. Picking up the pieces will require confronting not only the nihilism of America First, but the more deeply ingrained ideology of American exceptionalism.