Donald Trump

With the signing of the Protocol of Amendment to the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) on December 10, 2019, the battle over USMCA now moves to the Congress. Throughout the two-and-a-half year negotiating process, a threat by President Trump to withdraw from USMCA’s predecessor, the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), has hung over the negotiations, with significant legal uncertainty over whether the president has the authority to do so absent action by Congress. Congress now has the chance to clear up that ambiguity and to reassert its constitutional authority over trade policy. But to do so, it will have to act fast. It is likely that the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) will bypass the traditional process of holding a “mock markup” that would allow the Congress to propose amendments to both the legislation implementing the USMCA and the accompanying Statement of Administrative Action (SAA), which outlines executive branch commitments on how the provisions of the USMCA will be implemented. Rather than follow the usual order, USTR is expected to introduce a final, non-amendable bill next week, along with a (presumably amended) SAA, for quick consideration by the House Ways and Means Committee before it is sent to the House floor for final passage. Given the indications from Senate Majority Leader McConnell that the Senate will not take up the USMCA until after the impeachment trial ends early next year, it is not clear why all of the procedural steps in the fast track process must be waived. Before it is too late, Congress should insist on including a number of items in the implementing legislation or on essential changes to the May 30, 2019, draft Statement of Administrative Action (SAA). Indeed, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer’s transmittal letter for the SAA emphasized that the submission “is just that –a draft. It does not in any way prejudice the content of the final implementation package, i.e., the final SAA, final implementation legislation, and the final, binding text.” Now is the time for Congress to hold Ambassador Lighthizer to his word and insist on changes to the implementing bill and the SAA in the following areas: 1. Withdrawal from USMCA The language of the USMCA mirrors that of the NAFTA: any party may withdraw from USMCA by providing written notice of withdrawal to the other parties, with the withdrawal taking effect six months after notice is given. USMCA Article 34.6. What the text of the NAFTA and the USMCA do not say is who gets to decide to submit the withdrawal notice, under what authority, and pursuant to what procedures. Congress should fill in those blanks by insisting on language, preferably in the implementing bill itself but if not, in the SAA, that spells out a process and clear role for Congress before any withdrawal notice can be sent. If it takes an act of Congress under the well defined Trade Promotion Authority procedures, input from stakeholders and advisory committees, and a formal economic evaluation from the United States International Trade Commission (USITC) to enter into the USMCA, surely it ought to take at least some process and congressional input to withdraw. The May 30 draft SAA is completely silent on how the Trump administration intends to implement the withdrawal provision. Congress should insist that either the implementing legislation itself or the SAA include a commitment to a transparent process, including public hearings, input from the trade advisory committees, a USITC economic evaluation of the costs and benefits of withdrawal, and a fast-tracked Congressional vote before a notice of withdrawal can be sent to the USMCA parties. 2. Six-Year Joint Reviews Article 34.7 of USMCA calls for a meeting of the Free Trade Commission (consisting of trade ministers of the United States, Canada, and Mexico) at least every six years. The purpose of the meeting is to conduct a joint review of the USMCA’s operations, to consider any recommendations for action submitted by one of the USMCA parties, and to confirm each party’s desire to extend the USMCA for a sixteen-year period. Here too the May 30 draft SAA is silent on how the Trump administration intends to approach these six-year reviews. Congress should insist that either the implementing legislation or the SAA include a clear role for Congress in developing recommendations to be presented on behalf of the United States at the joint review sessions, and, as noted below, in determining whether to confirm continued U.S. participation in the UMSCA. 3. Decision to Invoke the Sixteen-Year Sunset Clause Article 34.7(1) states that the USMCA shall terminate sixteen years after it enters into force unless each of the three parties affirmatively confirms its desire to continue the agreement for a new sixteen-year period. That confirmation must be made in writing at the six-year joint review meetings. Congress should treat the decision to allow the USMCA to terminate at the end of the sixteen-year period the same as a notice of withdrawal. A decision not to confirm the United States’ continued participation in the USMCA ultimately has the same legal effect as withdrawal. It should be done only following a full process that includes input from all stakeholders and trade advisory committees, a USITC economic evaluation, and a vote of Congress. The uncertainty created by the manner in which U.S. trade policy has been conducted over the past three years has led to numerous calls for Congress to reassert the power expressly given to it by the Constitution to establish tariffs and regulate foreign commerce. The problem has been the limited opportunities for Congress to do so. The USMCA presents just such a chance. On the essential issue of whether to enter into and whether to exit as important a trade agreement as the one with our two largest trading partners—Canada and Mexico—Congress should insist on playing a central role. It should make it clear that the president does not have the authority to act without the express authorization of Congress.

In the history of the domestic politics of trade, the breakthrough announced this week on the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) is a genuine milestone. Following intensive negotiations—involving House Democrats, the Trump administration, labor unions, and the governments of Mexico and Canada—the three countries announced an agreement that will now lead to the ratification of a new trade architecture for North America. Robert Lighthizer, the U.S. trade representative, can fairly claim to have taken a big step in his promise to restore bipartisanship to U.S. trade policy. Ironically, however, the breakthrough came the same day in which the architecture for global trade—the World Trade Organization (WTO)—was plunged into the greatest crisis of its quarter century history as a result of U.S. intransigence. The United States has crippled the WTO’s capacity to resolve trade disputes among member nations, leaving the future of the organization in serious doubt. The question now—can the shaky new U.S. consensus on trade open the door to agreements with other countries? Or has the United States condemned itself to negotiations only with countries so highly dependent on the U.S. market, like Mexico and Canada, that they will submit to one-sided deals? Robert Putnam, the political scientist, famously argued that international negotiations are a “two-level game.” For international agreements to be reached, governments need not only to negotiate with other governments, but with their own domestic constituents. Agreements can break down at either level. For trade negotiations, the domestic side of that bargain has been weakening steadily in the United States for some three decades. When the Tokyo Round global trade agreement was ratified by Congress in 1979, the deal passed by a vote of 90-4 in the U.S. Senate, and 395-7 in the House of Representatives. The free trade agreement between the United States and Canada, passed in 1988 was nearly as popular. But the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the predecessor to USMCA, passed by just 234-200 when it was put to a vote in the House in 1993. A majority of Democrats voted against their own president, Bill Clinton, in opposing the deal. From there, Democrats became increasingly skeptical of trade. Republican President George W. Bush won House support for fast-track trade promotion authority by a single vote in 2001, with just twenty-one Democrats voting in favor. The Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) passed by two votes in 2005 with the support of just fifteen Democrats. Labor union opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a huge deal that would have freed up trade among the United States, Japan, and ten other Asia-Pacific nations, was a big reason that Democratic president Barack Obama could not get the agreement through Congress before he left office. The newly-minted President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the deal on his third day in the White House, calling it a sell-out of American interests. In the context of that history, the new USMCA is a big deal indeed. Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has voiced her strong support. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka has endorsed the deal, the first time labor unions have backed any trade pact since the tiny U.S.-Jordan deal in 2001, and the first time they have supported any trade agreement of consequence since the Kennedy Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in the 1960s. The deal came after a long back and forth between House Democrats and the Trump administration, in which Lighthizer supported the Democrats on issue after issue. The new USMCA includes a long wish list of Democratic trade priorities, including tighter rules of origin for car manufacturing, the virtual elimination of investor-state dispute settlement, intrusive provisions aimed at strengthening independent labor unions in Mexico, stronger protections for environmental laws, and weakened protection for pharmaceutical patents. Pelosi and the House Democrats repeatedly praised the Trump administration’s willingness to work with them on the deal. The politics have changed profoundly in the Republican Party as well. Had a Democratic president tried to push through such changes in USMCA, Republicans would have denounced the deal as a socialist abomination. It goes much further to address Democratic concerns than Republicans and their big corporate backers had ever been willing to consider. Many Republicans opposed Obama’s TPP, for example, because it was seen as too weak in protecting the interests of pharmaceutical companies, but the USMCA does even less for the drug companies than TPP. Yet Republicans will ignore the complaints from the industry and vote for the deal anyway. Trump has remade the GOP into a party of economic nationalism, and his congressional supporters will follow lockstep in approving the USMCA. What does this mean for the rest of the world? It will not have gone unnoticed that Canada and Mexico had to negotiate twice to get this deal—first with the Trump administration, and again with House Democrats. Mexico in particular was forced to swallow a series of provisions on labor rights that could be seen as threats to Mexico’s sovereignty. But both Mexico and Canada are so dependent on the huge U.S. market that they had no choice but to find a way to yes. Richard Neal, the Democratic chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said candidly: “They conceded just about every point we asked for.” He went on to say the USMCA would now be “a template for future trade agreements.” But if this new hybrid of Trumpian nationalism and Democratic progressivism is what it now takes to do trade deals with the United States, there may be very few takers. China, for instance, has so far resisted the Trump administration’s demands for wholesale reforms to its economic model—demands that enjoy widespread support among both Republicans and Democrats. The European Union would support many of the Democratic objectives on labor, environment, and investor rights, but has resisted Trump’s demands on agriculture and the U.S. trade deficit with Europe. In the WTO, the Trump administration’s complaints over what was seen as over-reach by the Appellate Body, the final court of appeal in trade disputes, were shared by the Obama administration. But the United States has been unable to persuade other WTO members to undertake big reforms, and instead has let the Appellate Body die by refusing to permit the appointment of new judges. Democrats in Congress have yet to raise a whisper of protest. And so other countries are now scrambling to find new ways to resolve trade disputes among themselves rather than acceding to U.S. demands. The genius of Putnam’s theory was to show that international agreements only come about, and can only be sustained, when both levels—the domestic and the international—line up properly. With the USMCA deal, the United States may have found a way back to bipartisan consensus on trade. But it may also be a very lonely spot.

The Kurds have no choice but to always trust the United States—and to suffer the inevitable consequences.

By announcing that Israeli settlements do not violate international law, the Trump administration continues a pattern of policy shifts that further weakens the prospects for Palestinian statehood.

Trump and Erdogan resolved few of the sharp U.S.-Turkish differences over defense and Middle East policy but the visit likely boosted Erdogan’s stature at home.

Questions of legitimacy have long plagued the G7. The Trump administration's announcement of the Trump National Doral resort as the venue for next year's summit marks a new low.

The latest episode of The President’s Inbox is live. I sat down with Steve Sestanovich, CFR’s senior fellow for Eurasian and Russian studies and the former U.S. ambassador-at-large for the former Soviet states, to discuss Ukraine. Here are three quick takeaways from our conversation: 1. Ukraine’s size, location, and wealth help explain its many troubles. Ukraine is one of the largest states in Europe, it has significant natural resources, and it sits on the dividing line between East and West. So lots of people have a stake in which way Ukraine tilts. Their conflicting efforts have kept the country from making a decisive choice one way or the other. 2. The Trump administration has a lot of cooks in the kitchen trying to implement its Ukraine policy. That dynamic is hardly new. Lots of administrations have appointed diplomats with overlapping responsibilities and divergent views on what needs to be done. What is unusual about U.S. policy toward Ukraine today is how far some of those involved stepped out of their assigned lanes and how they engaged directly with the president.  3. President Donald Trump has narrowed his freedom of maneuver on Ukraine and complicated his own policies. The impeachment inquiry puts Trump under great pressure to provide Ukraine with security assistance and to not be seen as blocking possible IMF economic assistance to Kyiv. The Ukrainians see the controversy justifying their decision to resist doing the favor that Trump requested. And Russian officials see the scandal as confirming their view that he cannot open a new chapter in U.S.-Russian relations. If you want to learn more about the potential fallout from the favor Trump asked of President Volodymyr Zelenksy, you should read Steve’s piece, “Is Russia Winning the Ukraine Scandal?” While noting that Russia officials argue that the United States has made itself “the laughingstock of the world,” he argues that the real lesson from the scandal is “the enduring strength of U.S. support” for Ukraine. Molly McKew offers a somewhat contrasting take on the scandal’s consequences, arguing that “the biggest winner of the Ukraine scandal is, sure enough, the Kremlin.” But she also makes the same point that Steve made to me, that Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to “keep Ukraine in limbo between Russia and the West.” If you are wondering why Ukraine keeps popping up in so many U.S. scandals, Julia Ioffe, who appeared on The President’s Inbox last year to discuss what Vladimir Putin wants, has an answer: “money.” As she put it, “There’s a lot of it sloshing around.” She also warns against trying to reduce Ukrainian politics to a morality play with “neat binaries—the forces there are either pro-Russia or pro-West; leaders are either corrupt actors or laudable reformers; the good guys versus the bad guys.” She sees lots of grey. Vox has a video explainer on the July 25 Trump-Zelensky phone call and why supporters of an impeachment inquiry say Trump crossed a line he shouldn’t have. It makes a nice pairing with the article that Edward Foley, an Ohio State University law school professor, has written asking: “Is it ever OK for a president to ask a foreign country to investigate a political rival?” While the focus here in the United States is on where the impeachment inquiry is headed, Nolan Peterson writes that Ukrainians are focused on whether new talks with Russia will bring an end to more than five years of fighting in eastern Ukraine. Some Ukrainians are happy that Zelensky agreed to talks, even though they are on the terms that the Kremlin demanded. Other Ukrainians are angry that Zelensky agreed to hold elections in the parts of the country controlled by Russian-backed separatists as the price for getting to the negotiating table. Margaret Gach assisted in the preparation of this post.

U.S. military and economic support for Ukraine has so far weathered the widening impeachment inquiry into President Trump’s contacts with Kyiv. This backing could strengthen Ukraine in the next round of diplomacy with Russia.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced late yesterday that the House had opened an impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump. It’s a news story that will be with us for weeks to come. Here are answers to five questions you might have now. Why an impeachment inquiry now? Support among Democrats for opening impeachment proceedings against Trump has been building for months for a litany of reasons, not the least being the findings of the Mueller Report. This push gained momentum with last week’s news that the administration had refused to send Congress a complaint from an unnamed whistleblower in the intelligence community, something it is required by law to do. Then the news broke that at least part of the whistleblower’s complaint involved Trump’s efforts to press Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to dig up dirt on former Vice President Joseph Biden and his son Hunter. That prompted seven freshman Democrats, all from so-called swing districts and all veterans of the U.S. military or the intelligence community, to write an op-ed in the Washington Post. They urged the House to investigate what they called “unprecedented allegations” that the president “used his position to pressure a foreign country into investigating a political opponent, and he sought to use U.S. taxpayer dollars as leverage to do it.” With moderate voices now joining more liberal ones, Pelosi moved with the backing of most of her caucus. What happens next? The step Pelosi took yesterday was to launch an “official impeachment inquiry.” In doing so, she did not commit to asking the full House to authorize the inquiry. That is a departure from how the House handled the Nixon and Clinton impeachments. In those two instances, the full House voted to direct the House Judiciary Committee to begin impeachment proceedings. Many Republican members of Congress have made much of this discrepancy, though it’s not obvious it has any legal significance. Although the Constitution explicitly empowers the House to impeach federal officials, it says nothing about the procedures it must follow in doing so. Neither do the rules of the House. Pelosi may have declined to call for a full House vote because she doesn’t believe she needs it, wants to spare Democrats in swing districts from having to go on the record, or doesn’t think she has the votes to carry the day in the House. If the latter is the reason, she may soon change her mind. As of today, 216 members of Congress are on record in favor of an impeachment inquiry. The magic number for a majority is 218. Pelosi also did not commit to holding a vote on whether to impeach Trump. Her remarks yesterday instead focused on the more immediate task of how to conduct the impeachment inquiry. She directed six House committees already conducting oversight investigations of Trump to review their work and to forward their most compelling evidence to the House Judiciary Committee. Pelosi did not set a deadline for that task or for the Judiciary Committee to complete its review of the materials it receives. In all, it could be weeks—or longer—before the Judiciary Committee makes any decisions. That means that talk about how the House might vote and what it might vote on is wildly premature. Even more premature is discussing what the Senate might do if the House votes to impeach the president. (Fun fact: The only thing the Constitution says about the Senate trial of an impeached president is that the chief justice of the Supreme Court must preside over the proceedings and that “the concurrence of two-thirds of the Members present” is required for conviction. The Constitution says nothing about how the Senate should conduct its trial. It doesn’t even explicitly require the Senate to hold one. It could conceivably ignore the House’s action.) How unusual is impeachment? Presidential impeachments used to be rare. Just one of the first thirty-six presidents—Andrew Johnson—was impeached. He was impeached by the House and then acquitted in the Senate by just one vote. (John F. Kennedy’s Pulitzer-Prize winning book, Profiles in Courage, devotes a chapter to Sen. Edmund G. Ross of Kansas, whose vote for acquittal saved Johnson’s presidency.) Pelosi’s announcement makes Trump the third president among the last nine to be the target of an impeachment inquiry. Richard Nixon, of course, resigned the presidency before the House could impeach him. Bill Clinton failed to head off impeachment, but was acquitted by the Senate. Trump’s impeachment inquiry differs from Nixon’s and Clinton’s in one significant way. Both Nixon and Clinton were in the middle of their second term in office. They could not run for re-election, so voters wouldn’t have had the chance to weigh in on their suitability for office. Trump, however, is in his first term. His inquiry could easily drag into 2020. Which raises the question: Will voters, who so far haven’t been keen on opening impeachment proceedings, want to reserve for themselves the right to decide at the ballot box whether he is fit to hold office? What will impeachment mean for U.S. foreign policy? Trump suggested yesterday that the consequences won’t be good, tweeting: Such an important day at the United Nations, so much work and so much success, and the Democrats purposely had to ruin and demean it with more breaking news Witch Hunt garbage. So bad for our Country! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 24, 2019 Impeachment will soak up the time and energy of not just the White House, but also of most of official Washington. Whether and how much this will hurt U.S. national interests is impossible to say, and not just because disagreement exists over the merits of Trump’s America First policies. The record of the Nixon and Clinton experiences suggests that is easy to overstate the impact of impeachment. Watergate undoubtedly handcuffed Nixon’s diplomacy, but the country’s main diplomatic challenges—most notably the war in Vietnam—had been set in motion by decisions made long before Watergate. In Clinton’s case, impeachment may have affected what he could do abroad, but not so much that either he or Secretary of State Madeleine Albright bothered to mention it in their memoirs. Of course, Trump is a different kind of president with a dramatically different operating style operating in a different geopolitical environment. So perhaps, as automobile commercials like to state, our mileage may vary. Can anything be said for certain about impeachment? Yes, existing partisan divisions on Capitol Hill are going to deepen, as the early and differing reactions to the summary of Trump’s phone call with Zerensky attests. That wouldn’t have been a surprise to the Framers. As Alexander Hamilton observed in Federalist #65, the pursuit of impeachment: will seldom fail to agitate the passions of the whole community, and to divide it into parties, more or less friendly or inimical, to the accused. In many cases, it will connect itself with the pre-existing factions, and will enlist all their animosities, partialities, influence and interest to one side, or on the other; and in such cases there will always be the greatest danger, that the decision will be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt. Of course, the fact that turbulence is predictable doesn’t mean it will be enjoyable. Margaret Gach assisted in the preparation of this post.

Though Trump’s tone was solemn and even-keeled, the overall thrust of his UN General Assembly speech was of transactional nationalism, emphasizing the importance of pursuing national interests and combating globalism.

There’s been a lot of coverage of the scale and unprecedented nature of Sunday’s “Howdy, Modi!” rally—the 50,000-plus Indian American participants in the enormous NRG Stadium in Houston, the meaning of U.S. President Donald J. Trump’s opening-act appearance for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and the recognition of the Indian American community’s growing political heft. In later remarks, Trump remarked upon the crowd’s adoration for Modi, calling him “an American (sic) version of Elvis.” What struck me as unusual was the high degree to which both leaders delivered  domestically oriented political content in their speeches. It was like back-to-back political rallies aimed at different audiences. Foreign policy took a back seat. For Trump, this meant a focus, in the middle of his remarks, on U.S. unemployment rates and the benefits of the Trump tax cuts. For Modi, the great bulk of his remarks focused on India’s development and the accomplishments of his government, with trademark Modi facts and figures on sanitation, cooking gas, road building, financial inclusion through bank accounts, and improvements in ease of doing business. This Modi government “report card” served to signal for the Houston listeners his focus and attention to service delivery and improvements in quality of life. Modi could have delivered most of that speech anywhere in India largely without change. And it’s likely that his primary audience was the millions of people watching the event on television back in India. The actual bilateral policy content of the Modi and Trump remarks—and there was more bilateral policy material in Trump’s speech—covered well-trod ground on the strength of “common values and our shared commitment to democracy;” a recap of two-way investment and developments in energy trade; a placeholder for future defense trade deals; and invocations of the importance of securing borders and guarding against “illegal immigrants.” As Dr. Tanvi Madan of the Brookings Institution noted, this language will likely hold different meanings for listeners in the United States and India: for Indian listeners, “border security” suggests fortifying against cross-border terrorism from Pakistan, and “illegal immigrants” suggests the recent National Register of Citizens (a new register for citizens in the northeast Indian state of Assam that has excluded 1.9 million residents). Trump did not weigh in on these specific issues in their Indian context but some might interpret his words in that way. He also was present for, but did not address, the huge roar of approval from the crowd when Modi spoke about saying “farewell” to Article 370, which afforded India’s state of Jammu and Kashmir its traditional autonomy, and how it had “deprived the people of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh from development and equal rights.” No one at any point mentioned the continued detention of an unclear (but large) number of Kashmiri politicians, intellectuals, businesspeople, and civil society leaders going on more than six weeks.    The second Trump-Modi bilateral meeting took place on Tuesday in New York. Media reports said that U.S. and Indian trade negotiators were working to reach agreement on something to announce this week, but no deal emerged in Houston, nor in New York. That Modi included his commerce and industry minister, Piyush Goyal, as part of his delegation points to the importance of trade negotiations on this visit. But the trade issues are doubtless difficult, and have been for a long time. In their pre-meeting press conference, Trump answered a pointed question about this anticipated trade deal with the following: Well, I think very soon.  We’re doing very well.  And Bob Lighthizer, who’s right here, was negotiating with India and their very capable representatives.  And I think very soon we’ll have a trade deal.  We’ll have the larger deal down the road a little bit, but we will have a trade deal very soon. Speculation about the likely outcome centers on some announcement of a limited set of measures to resolve some of the recent trade irritants, such as medical device price limitations in India, tariffs, and some “restoration” of the trade preference known as the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP), which the Trump administration revoked from India in June, citing barriers to market access. We should anticipate and welcome whatever emerges as the trade “deal,” but without exaggerating what it will be. Resolving sticking points on a handful of issues is simply not the same as a major trade agreement. The U.S.-India trade relationship has been in a rocky patch for more than a year, and any progress on that front will be helpful, but will represent only the first steps toward clearing away problems—not a major trade agreement. The latter, should such a negotiation begin, will take far more work, and likely years, to see through to completion.

Trump’s third annual address to the UN General Assembly will be a performance to suffer through. His America First worldview rejects the very purposes and priorities of the United Nations. 

The president is in the difficult position of either backing down in the face of Iranian threats and suspected attacks or escalating the conflict in ways he clearly wants to avoid.