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A Blueprint For A New American Trade Policy, Timothy Meyer, Ganesh Sitaraman

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In recent years, it has become clear that American trade policy needs to change. For decades, U.S. policy has reflected the implicit assumption that trade liberalization is beneficial for everyone, with few distributional downsides over time. But this assumption hasn’t been borne out. Instead, decades of trade liberalization have led to a backlash that resulted in both 2016 presidential nominees opposing the Obama Administration’s proposed Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). And since 2017, President Donald Trump has begun a trade war with China; raised tariffs on the grounds of protecting national security; renegotiated NAFTA, though on terms that do not obviously …