Should Biden embrace multilateralism? In trade, yes.
Summarizing Trump’s foreign policy: protectionism
Former President Trump’s ‘America First’ trade agenda centered around neorealist protectionism of domestic industries alongside hearty nationalism, nativism, and populism. This agenda personified certain realist assumptions– namely power-centrism and egoism. The administration claimed their actions were in response to the prisoner’s dilemma problem of cheating as while “the United States and many other nations play by the rules, [some] countries use Government-run industrial planning and state-owned enterprises to rig the system in their favor.” (Trump, 2018). However, the actions of this administration, abandoning TPP and impeding the WTO appellate body, resulted in a problem of trust.
Biden’s parting from Trump: globalization
Following the U.S. 2020 election, President Biden gained office and caveated from Trump’s neorealist economic foreign policy towards globalized, neoliberal institutionalism. This administration forefronts economic openness in hopes of commercial peace and embodies liberal themes such as optimism working with allies, progressivism on issues, and reformism of President Trump’s policies. Furthermore, the Biden administration supports TPP and the WTO as norm-enforcing institutions and organizations. These institutions reinforce the collectively held opinions on trade form the constitutions of these organizations. Here, three liberal mechanisms are demonstrated: the lengthening of the shadow of the future via the extension of American involvement in trade institutions, providing information via agreements and diplomacy, reducing transaction costs via multinational organizations like the TPP and WTO, and issue linkage through trade agreements.
Multilateralism’s ‘immutability’
Furthermore, the current administration’s decrease in critiquing institutions demonstrates the anchoring effect: specifically the anchoring of the immutability of institutions in a constructivist manner. The pros of multilateralism lie within neoliberal institutionalism: broader coalitions are more effective in tackling international trade disputes and providing legitimacy to arbitration methods. However, a con is the organizational decision-making of institutions. The bureaucratic standard operating procedures of the WTO, for example, cause cases to be argued in front of the arbiter for 16 years. This inefficiency often results in trade disputes being resolved externally — completely circumventing the WTO. Furthermore, the governmental politics model plays a confounding role. Of course WTO leaders petition the government on how indispensable their own institutions are because of their own vested interest. This influence thus makes states act irrationally.
Policy Suggestion
The Biden administration should continue to pursue multilateralism because it is best suited to create the coalitions necessary to address multicausal trade issues. Especially in an anarchic system without centralized justice, anarchy is what individual states make of it. The WTO and TPP, though bogged by systemic bureaucratic shortcomings, are still generally more beneficial than harmful in regulating trade and arbitration of the international political economy.
