Trade Archive

Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, WPR Newsletter and Engagement Editor Benjamin Wilhelm curates the week’s top news and expert analysis on China. The United States Department of Justice announced criminal charges against Chinese telecommunications firm Huawei Technologies and one of its top executives on Monday, escalating tensions between the two countries as they begin a new round of high-level trade negotiations. A 13-count indictment was unsealed in New York City, targeting Huawei, two of its affiliates and Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou. The allegations include bank and wire fraud, violating U.S. sanctions on Iran and conspiring to obstruct justice related to […]

British Prime Minister Theresa May suffered a humiliating defeat earlier this month when Parliament voted by an overwhelming margin to reject the Brexit deal she had negotiated with the European Union. Yet there doesn’t appear to be a Plan B. Many are now betting that May will request a delay for Britain to leave the EU beyond the deadline of March 29, which May triggered in March 2017 by invoking Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty and beginning the exit process. But the odds of a no-deal breakup also went up this month, despite fears that that outcome could lead […]

Since the establishment of the World Trade Organization in 1995, every American president has struggled to some extent with the compromises embedded in the bargaining over the rules of international trade. But that mild discomfort has boiled over with President Donald Trump, who is deeply skeptical of multilateral institutions and has focused much of his ire on the WTO. This is now leading to a situation where the WTO’s system for settling trade disputes could grind to a halt this year. How has that happened, and what would it mean for U.S. interests? A key American goal during the Uruguay […]

Today would seem to offer a generous news cycle for a weekly columnist in search of a topic to write about. The New York Times and The Washington Post are back to trading bombshells about Donald Trump, with recent reports that the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation against Trump in the early months of his presidency because top officials feared he might be compromised or controlled by the Kremlin, and that Trump has gone to great lengths to hide the details of his meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin from his own administration. Those were soon followed by revelations that […]

Factional divisions within the banned opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party, or CNRP, came to the surface in December, when a party conference in Atlanta named exiled opposition leader Sam Rainsy its acting president. The conference was boycotted and its outcome rejected by supporters of Kem Sokha, the CNRP’s erstwhile president who remains under house arrest in Cambodia pending trial on charges of treason. In an email interview with WPR, Astrid Norén-Nilsson, associate senior lecturer at the Center for East and South-East Asian Studies at Lund University, Sweden, discusses the origins of the CNRP leadership dispute, and the implications of the […]

The U.S. government is still shut down over President Donald Trump’s demand for money to build a wall on the southern border. Children, mainly from Central America, are dying in a desperate effort to cross that border and escape violence in their home countries. So how in the world did somebody in the Trump administration decide it might be a good idea to cut trade ties with some of those countries? Though trade officials would not confirm it, an unnamed official told McClatchy last week that the administration is considering kicking the Dominican Republic, El Salvador and Nicaragua out of […]

In January 2017, as Donald Trump prepared to enter the White House, predictions of what his foreign policy might look like ran the gamut from a retreat into neo-isolationism to a reassertion of bare-knuckled power politics. As the incoming administration scrambled to name the team that would be responsible for translating the president-elect’s rhetoric into policy, I speculated about what might replace the liberal world order he had inveighed against during the campaign. Two years later, in light of his actual policies, the time is ripe to consider whether these scenarios were prescient or unfounded. Candidate Trump had made his […]

Back in the early months of Donald Trump’s presidency, I took a playful stab at imagining a retrospective “view from 2019” of his first two years in office. Given that it’s now 2019, it’s only fair that I compare my predictions with how things have actually turned out. Unsurprisingly, I was off on many of the details. On the broader themes, I was closer to the mark—with one major exception, where I was flat-out wrong. To begin with the details my fictional narrative missed, I wrongly assumed that the so-called adults in the room, who were ascendant within the administration […]

Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, WPR Newsletter and Engagement Editor Benjamin Wilhelm curates the week’s top news and expert analysis on China. The United States and China appear to have made progress in trade negotiations that wrapped up Wednesday afternoon in Beijing, but it remains unclear whether that will translate into a resolution to their ongoing trade dispute. In a sign of Beijing’s commitment to reaching a deal with Washington, Chinese Vice Premier Liu He—President Xi Jinping’s top economic aide and the official in charge of Beijing’s trade talks with Washington—made a surprise appearance at Monday’s talks, which were officially conducted […]

After a more-bark-than-bite approach to trade during his first year in office, President Donald Trump took on the world in 2018 and shows no sign of letting up. In Europe, British Prime Minister Theresa May has so far failed to convince Parliament to accept the Brexit deal she negotiated with Brussels. And under the radar, the World Trade Organization is facing paralysis if there is no compromise on how to reform its system of settling disputes. These are among the ongoing challenges that are likely to make 2019 another unsettling year for global trade. Even before the calendar turned to […]

In this week’s podcast, WPR’s Judah Grunstein and Frederick Deknatel discuss the top stories WPR will be keeping a close eye on in 2019—beginning with the unpredictable nature of U.S. foreign policy under President Donald Trump and its impact on issues like global trade, relations with China, European politics, and stability in Latin America and Africa. If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get our uncompromising analysis delivered straight to your inbox. The newsletter offers a free preview article every day of the […]