A good, accessible and free!! article by two well-known analysts. It’s not news to anyone who has worked in this field, but more people without that kind of background… particularly in the U.S., should read it to understand what is going on.
Trump’s Self-Defeating Trade Policy
by Inu Manak and Allison Smith, in Foreign Affairs
May 14, 2026
In his second term, U.S. President Donald Trump has flipped the script on trade policy, slapping tariffs on allies and adversaries alike to punish perceived unfairness and to extract an array of concessions. He declared that the guiding logic of this new approach is reciprocity. On social media, he explained that “whatever Countries charge the United States of America, we will charge them—No more, no less!” U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer has called the United States’ new bilateral deals “agreements for reciprocal trade,” or ARTs, a reference to his boss’s most famous book on negotiation.
But the Trump administration’s approach is not reciprocity at all. It is coercive unilateralism dressed up as reciprocity. The United States has pursued reciprocal trade for the past 90 years, but what Trump is doing breaks from this tradition. Under the threat of tariffs and, in some cases, territorial expansion, the administration has pressured U.S. trading partners to accept unbalanced trade concessions. Washington’s goals are to rebalance trade by tilting the playing field in favor of U.S. firms and producers, to force partners to pay for what Trump perceives as past unfairness, and to realign trade policy with foreign policy goals that preserve U.S. hegemony. Other countries are expected to give a lot but get little in return.
The United States, however, cannot remake the entire international trading system on its own. Any structural change to the international order requires others to buy in to the vision that is being sold. U.S. trading partners may be willing to try to appease Trump in the short term, but they do have other trading options—and they are already starting to pursue alternatives to the United States. Trump will need to offer them a few carrots along with using sticks if he wants these trade arrangements to last. Otherwise, the trust and order that the United States built through decades of careful trade compromises will quickly run out. An “America first” trade policy will leave America behind.
Read the full article from Foreign Affairs
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