Editorial
| Author | Panayotis M. Protopsaltis |
| Pages | 293-298 |
Editorial
editorial
The trade policy of the United States (U.S.) traditionally relied almost exclusively
on multilateral negotiations in the context of the General Agreement on Tariffs
and Trade (GATT) and avoided bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs), except
with countries whose import tariffs had little effect on the direction of trade.1 This
changed in 1985 when the United States concluded a free trade agreement with
Israel. As Gantz explains, “the year 1985 marked a pivotal period in U.S. foreign
trade policy. The United States began to depart from its long-standing opposition
to regional trade agreements.”2 The conclusion of the Canada-United States Free
Trade Agreement (CUSFTA) in 1987 led to the conclusion of the North American
Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994 and, subsequently, to the Free Trade
Areas of the Americas initiative.3 After 2000, the United States sought to densify
their FTAs network and by 2015 gradually concluded bilateral4 and plurilateral5
free trade agreements with a total of 25 countries. The Transatlantic Trade and
Investment Partnership (TTIP), currently under negotiation, will be added to this
network. Interestingly enough, the United States concluded free trade agreements
mostly with economically and politically weaker countries that had much to gain
from access to the U.S. market and had little signicance for U.S. trade.6 In contrast,
the United States have no free trade agreements with some of their major trading
partners, namely, China and the European Union even though the United Kingdom,
Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and France in the aggregate account for more
than China in total export value for goods.7
In his introduction in this volume, Gantz attributes the change in the U.S.
policy to the slow progress of the European countries towards economic integration
in the 1970s and the early 1980s, as well as to the increase of the European trade
power and the lack of European support for a new GATT negotiating round, leading
1 Sidney Weintraub, Some Implications of U.S. Trade Agreements with Chile and
Singapore 8 (LAEBA, Working Paper No.14, Jun. 2003), available at http://www19.
iadb.org/intal/intalcdi/PE/2010/06219.pdf (last visited Jul. 20, 2016).
2 David Gantz, The ‘Bipartisan Trade Deal,’ Trade Promotion Authority and the Future of
U.S. Free Trade Agreements, 28 St. louiS u. l. rev. 116 (2008).
3 Weintraub, supra note 1, at 8.
4 Australia (2005), Bahrain (2006), Canada (1987), Chile (2004), Colombia (2011), Israel
(1985), Jordan (2001), South Korea (2011), Morocco (2006), Oman (2006), Panama
(2011), Peru (2007), Singapore (2004).
5 NAFTA with Canada, Mexico (1994), Dominican Republic-Central America Free
Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR) with Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras,
Nicaragua, Dominican Republic (2006) and the Trans-Pacic Partnership (TTP) with
Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore,
Vietnam (2015).
6 Bernard K. Gordon, By Invitation Only: Cozy Free Trade Deals Subvert Global
Integration, yale gloBal online, Feb. 13, 2003, available at http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/
content/invitation-only-cozy-free-trade-deals-subvert-global-integration (last visited
Jul. 20, 2016).
7 See, Top U.S. Trade Partners Ranked by 2014 U.S. Total Export Value for Goods,
available at http://www.trade.gov/mas/ian/build/groups/public/@tg_ian/documents/
webcontent/tg_ian_003364.pdf (last visited Jul. 20, 2016).
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