The public faith in commerce

CNBC reports that President Trump has launched a fresh round of tariffs directed at sixty trading partners, among them the European Union, the United Kingdom, and China. The measure is broad in scope and, by the reporting's own description, deliberately more aggressive than prior rounds. I will not pretend to know the precise schedules or the technical instruments used to impose them — those are matters of modern legislative and executive architecture I could not have foreseen. But the shape of the question is one I have turned over many times.

A commercial treaty is not a courtesy. It is a negotiated exchange of obligations — consideration given for consideration received, in the language of the law. When the United States enters such an arrangement, whether through a bilateral convention or a multilateral body such as the World Trade Organization, it pledges the public faith. That pledge does not belong to the administration that made it. It belongs to the nation. To treat it as a disposable instrument of momentary leverage is to spend a currency — credibility — that accumulates only slowly and dissipates with alarming speed.

I am not insensible to the legitimate grievance that underlies this policy. During my own time, I negotiated a treaty with Britain that satisfied almost no one precisely because I was trying to secure what was attainable rather than what was satisfying. The harder truth of commerce diplomacy is this: if a trading partner violates its obligations — through subsidies, through currency manipulation, through barriers that make the agreement a fiction — there is a lawful remedy. One presses the case through the mechanisms the parties have agreed upon. One does not simply repudiate the framework because the framework is inconvenient. To do so is to teach every future partner that American promises carry an expiration date fixed by domestic political weather.

The nations now targeted will draw their own conclusions — and that inference is not mine from any dossier, but a principle I would wager on from long observation of how sovereign states respond to what they perceive as contempt. They will retaliate where they can, accommodate where they must, and begin, quietly, to build commercial arrangements that route around American leverage. The Atlantic alliance that has underwritten Western security since the middle of the last century rests in part on a shared expectation of economic good faith. I would not disturb that expectation lightly.

What should be done? The proper course is not capitulation, nor is it escalation for its own dramatic effect. It is a disciplined articulation of the specific grievance, a formal invocation of whatever dispute-resolution mechanism the relevant agreement provides, and — where those mechanisms have genuinely failed — a renegotiation pursued through transparent means, with the consent of the legislature, whose power over commerce the Constitution vested for good reason. A tariff imposed by executive decree without that deliberate process is a shortcut that saves time now and mortgages credibility indefinitely.

I chose my words in the Treaty of Paris and in the convention with Britain as though each phrase would be litigated for a generation — because I believed it would be. That is the proper attitude toward any instrument that binds nations. Commerce is the continuation of diplomacy by other means. Treat it accordingly.