Look West: The Evolution of US Trade Policy Toward Asia

Abstract

US trade policy toward Asia has undergone an important evolution over the last 60 years, reflecting not only changes in its vision of engaging Asia but also in the general American approach to trade negotiations. Put succinctly, in the late 1980s the USA turned away from its former deep commitment to multilateral trade negotiations and began to pursue a strategy of ‘competitive liberalization’. This shift has been marketed as an innovative approach to trade negotiations, and includes the pursuit of bilateral and minilateral arrangements as well as sectorally based market opening. At the turn of the millennium we have seen the active pursuit of bilateral trade agreements. How can we categorize the patterns of US trade arrangements over time? What are the driving forces behind the evolution of US trade policy towards Asia? What are the implications, both domestically and internationally, of this changing US trade strategy? And finally, what is the likely direction of future US trade policy?

La política comercial de los Estados Unidos con Asia ha evolucionado de manera significativa durante los últimos 60 años. Esto se refleja no sólo en el cambio de visión de comprometer al Asia, sino también en el enfoque americano de las negociaciones comerciales. En pocas palabras, a finales de los años ochenta, los Estados Unidos se alejaron de su antiguo compromiso de negociaciones comerciales multilaterales e iniciaron una estrategia de ‘liberalización competitiva’. Este cambio se ha vendido como un enfoque innovador de las negociaciones comerciales. Esto también incluye la búsqueda de acuerdos bilaterales y minilaterales, así como la apertura de mercados con base en lo sectorial. Al cambiar de milenio se ha observado la búsqueda activa de acuerdos bilaterales de comercio. ¿Cómo podemos clasificar los patrones de los convenios comerciales de Estados Unidos en el tiempo? ¿Cuáles son las fuerzas motrices que están detrás de la evolución de la política comercial de los Estados Unidos con el Asia? ¿Cuáles son las implicaciones tanto a nivel interno como a nivel internacional, del cambio de la estrategia comercial de los Estados Unidos? Y por último, ¿Cuál será la dirección más probable que adoptará en el futuro la política comercial de los Estados Unidos?

Keywords:

• US trade policy
• competitive liberalization
• trade agreements
• Asia

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this article was prepared for a conference entitled ‘Still the Asian Century?’, University of Birmingham, 10–12 September 2008. I would like to thank the Abe Fellowship program of the Japan Foundation for their generous support of my research. For research assistance, I am grateful to Cindy Cheng, Cindy Hwang, and Peter Volberding. I am also indebted to the referees for their valuable suggestions.

Notes

I use FTAs and PTAs interchangeably as governments generally use the term FTA to refer to their own accords.

This section draws on Aggarwal (2001).

See for example, Mansfield and Milner (1999, p. 592), who recognize the problematic nature of the term ‘regionalism’ but then proceed to use this term in their analysis.

This usage differs from that of Yarbrough and Yarbrough (1992), which conflates third party enforcement with these terms so that ‘bilateral’ for them can also mean three countries, a highly counterintuitive use. Keohane (1990) refers to an agreement among three or more states as multilateralism. Richardson (1987) is consistent with my usage.

Of these, the dimension of geographical scope is the most controversial. It is worth noting that this category is quite subjective, since simple distance is hardly the only relevant factor in defining a ‘geographic region’. Despite the interest that regionalism has attracted, the question of how to define a region remains highly contested. See the discussion by Mansfield and Milner (1999), Katzenstein (1997), and Aggarwal and Fogarty (2004), among others.

See http://globaltradealert.org for a listing of trade measures being undertaken by countries in the context of the financial crisis.

This subsection draws on Aggarwal and Lin (2002), which focuses on the pitfalls of what we term ‘opportunistic liberalization’ and where we characterize US trade policy as being recently characterized as strategy without vision. See also the excellent concise discussion of historical trends in US trade policy in Bergsten (2002). The classic account remains Destler (2005).

See Aggarwal (1985) for a discussion of the nesting of economic issues with a security context. For a systematic analysis of how alliances affect trade policies, see Gowa (1995).

Calder (2004, pp. 138–140) outlines the key defining features of the San Francisco system: (1) a dense network of bilateral security alliances; (2) an absence of multilateral security structures; (3) strong asymmetry in alliance relations, both in security and economics; (4) special precedence to Japan; and (5) liberal trade access to American markets, coupled with relatively limited development assistance.

Much has been written on the creation of APEC and NAFTA so I do not provide details here.