Trump’s aggressive style gets trade results

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has muscled Canada into joining a revamped North American trade deal, sealed a pact with South Korea and coaxed a reluctant Japan into agreeing to one-on-one trade talks. All in the past two weeks. To President Donald Trump and his allies, the results vindicate his drive to upend traditional trade policy and deploy import taxes — real and threatened — as a cudgel to get concessions out of America’s trading partners.

“Without tariffs,” Trump said Monday after his team announced that Canada had followed Mexico in agreeing to a revamped North American deal, “we wouldn’t be standing here.”

Some likeminded business groups agree that Trump’s in-your-face style, a far more confrontational stance than his predecessors deployed, deserves credit.

“Aggressive, unilateral action is making deals more possible,” said Michael Stumo, CEO of the Coalition for a Prosperous America, which supports a combative U.S. trade policy.

Negotiating without a credible threat of trade sanctions, Stumo argued, “leaves no incentive for other countries to agree to anything new.”

Critics, though, contend that Trump’s apparent breakthroughs appear much more impressive than they actually are. What’s more, they say, the backlash the administration could face in the future from formerly friendly trade partners could diminish whatever gains have been achieved.

“You set a bunch of fires ... you put them out and you call yourself a hero,” said Philip Levy, senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a White House economist under President George W. Bush.

The critics say the recent trade deals have produced few concrete gains and offer scant reason for optimism about the administration’s riskiest gamble of all: The trade war it’s ignited with China, the world’s second-biggest economy after the United States.