“It must be an unwritten rule that international economic orders emerge at stately hotels. In 1944, as World War II raged, Allied representatives gathered at a picturesque New Hampshire resort named Bretton Woods to discuss how to establish a postwar economic order to restore the sensible flow of trade in a fractured world.
Although the resulting Bretton Woods system ended in 1976, its legacy lives on. Our current, nameless global order, which is dominated by the World Trade Organization and is notionally designed to pursue economic efficiency and regulate the trade policies of its 166 member countries, is untenable and unsustainable.
The United States has paid for the system with the loss of industrial jobs and economic security, other countries have been unable to make needed reforms, and the biggest winner has been China, with its state-owned enterprises and five-year plans. Unsurprisingly, the past decade has seen significant international and bipartisan American frustration at the system’s failure to adapt to meet the essential interests of sovereign nations.
Now, reform is at hand. Last week at his Turnberry resort on the Scottish coast, President Trump and the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, concluded a historic agreement — one that is fair, balanced and oriented toward serving concrete national interests rather than vague aspirations of multilateral institutions.
Indeed, by using a mix of tariffs and deals for foreign market access and investment, the United States has laid the foundation for a new global trading order.
The previous system rejected tariffs as a legitimate tool of public policy, meaning that the United States sacrificed tariff protection for critical manufacturing and other sectors. Over the past three decades, the United States slashed barriers to our market to allow vast inflows of foreign goods, services, labor and capital. At the same time, other countries kept their markets closed to our goods and deployed a suite of policies — such as subsidies, wage suppression, lax labor and environmental standards, regulatory distortions and currency manipulation — to artificially boost exports to the United States. This approach made the United States and a handful of other economies the consumers of last resort for countries pursuing beggar-thy-neighbor economic policies.
Our trading partners were adept at this game, and elites on Wall Street and in Washington were all too happy to cash in on the global arbitrage by moving production abroad. The net result?
The bulk of global manufacturing shifted to jurisdictions such as China, Vietnam and Mexico where companies could exploit vulnerable workers or benefit from expansive state support while the United States ran up what in absolute terms is the highest trade deficit in the history of the world. This led to extensive and well-documented losses in U.S. industrial capacity and employment as well as reliance on our adversaries for critical supply chains.
We subordinated our country’s economic and national security imperatives to a lowest common denominator of global consensus. This approach harmed American workers, their families and communities by undermining a manufacturing sector that creates high-wage jobs, fosters innovation and catalyzes investment across the economy.
What began at Bretton Woods as a necessary effort to rebuild a global trade system shattered by war evolved, over nine rounds of trade negotiations, into something unrecognizable. The measured guidelines for commerce developed in the Kennedy and Tokyo Rounds gave way to our recent experiment in global hyper-integration, embodied in the Uruguay Round, which concluded in 1994 and established the W.T.O.
We are now witnessing the Trump Round. On April 2, President Trump announced tariffs to address the national emergency posed by the trade deficit. The intense bilateral negotiations that followed were held in diverse locations across the world: Washington, Geneva, Jeju Island, Paris, London, Stockholm and, of course, Turnberry. Our trading partners had never before shown such interest in opening their markets to the United States, aligning on matters of economic and national security, and rebalancing trade in a more sustainable direction. In a few short months, the United States secured more foreign market access than it had in years of fruitless W.T.O negotiations.
Reversing decades of harmful policy that weakened our manufacturing capacity and work force will take time and coordinated effort across the public and private sectors. But keeping the status quo would only accelerate the dangerous trajectory of deindustrialization. We require a generational project to re-industrialize America, and time is short.
When I joined a critical mass of my fellow trade ministers in June at a meeting of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris, I was struck by how many voiced serious concerns about the danger of macroeconomic imbalances, the threat of nonmarket practices and the sclerotic state of the global trading system — the same issues President Trump has raised for years and now taken emergency action to address. What was long dismissed as heresy by the free-trade fundamentalists in Brussels, Geneva and Washington is now becoming conventional wisdom.
In announcing the U.S.-European Union deal last week, President von der Leyen echoed the call to refashion global trade to adapt to economic and political realities. She explained to reporters that the trans-Atlantic economic relationship needed “rebalancing” to ensure that it could be “more sustainable.” Such recognition is reinforced by additional deals with Britain, Cambodia, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Thailand and Vietnam, which make up almost 40 percent of U.S. trade, according to my office’s figures. Other countries with large trade surpluses with the United States are subject to generally higher tariffs. The new economic order, solidified at Turnberry, is emerging in real time.
The results are astounding. Every year for 40 years, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative has produced a detailed report called the National Trade Estimate chronicling various barriers faced by U.S. companies, including high tariffs, requirements to produce goods in the countries where the companies want to do business, and restrictions on agricultural products contrary to scientific consensus. In the past, the only significant way the United States could remove these barriers (if at all) was by giving away the tariffs defending our manufacturing sector. President Trump has flipped the script on this: Now, we are systematically eliminating these barriers abroad while ensuring sufficient tariff protection at home.
Indonesia is lowering 99.3 percent of its tariffs on imports from the United States and eliminating a slew of longstanding non-tariff barriers, while accepting a 19 percent tariff on exports to the United States. South Korea is accepting U.S. auto standards along with a 15 percent tariff. Vietnam pledged to lower all of its tariffs and barriers in exchange for a 20 percent rate. Most countries we are negotiating with have also agreed to cooperate on economic security to ensure the safety and reliability of our critical supply chains.
Countries are also committing to upgrade and better enforce their labor standards, tackling arbitrages that have put American workers and producers at a disadvantage. Multiple countries will join the United States (along with the E.U., Mexico and Canada) in banning the importation of goods made with forced labor. Eliminating global slavery was a longstanding goal of advocates and policymakers, but it was the leverage of President Trump’s tariffs that finally made it possible to unlock meaningful progress.
Similarly, countries are agreeing to improve resource efficiency and enforcement of environmental laws, including in the most problematic sectors, such as illegal logging, illegal fishing and the illegal wildlife trade. The international trade system should not force Americans to compete with those who use our responsible capitalism against us as a competitive advantage.
Importantly, these commitments are actionable, and the United States will enforce them. Rather than the drawn-out dispute settlement process favored by the old guard of trade bureaucrats, the new U.S. approach is to closely monitor implementation of the deals and swiftly reimpose a higher tariff rate for noncompliance if needed. President Trump uniquely recognizes that the privilege of selling into the world’s most lucrative consumer market is a mighty carrot. And a tariff is a formidable stick.
At the World Trade Organization, enacting changes to trade rules requires total consensus among nations. In fact, the last attempt at serious reform, known as the Doha Round, failed because protectionist nations refused to take down their trade barriers to the United States. Moreover, our adversaries relish blocking reform. They prefer a status quo that feeds an exploding U.S. trade deficit, sapping this nation of the industrial might that made it, and keeps it, a superpower.
But the rules of international trade cannot be a suicide pact. By imposing tariffs to rebalance the trade deficit and negotiating significant reforms that form the basis of a new international system, the United States has shown bold leadership to address what policymakers long considered intractable problems.
Many of these deals also come with significant investment commitments into U.S. productive capacity, such as $600 billion in the case of the European Union and $350 billion by South Korea. These investments — 10 times larger than the inflation-adjusted value of the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe after World War II — will accelerate U.S. reindustrialization. South Korea will help reinvigorate the American shipbuilding industry, which has atrophied in the face of nonmarket competition. These types of investments are on top of purchase commitments that cumulatively account for almost $1 trillion of American energy, agriculture, defense and industrial products. This demand for American goods and ready access to capital will allow American manufacturing to reassert leadership across strategic sectors where we have fallen behind.
Skeptics point out that tariffs, although once a fixture of American economic policy, have not been used this extensively for generations. But we now have data showing that the failure to use tariffs or similar protections created an economy that was heavy on finance and consulting fees and low on the lasting wealth and security that come from making things. Even among those who agree with that diagnosis, some say the president’s remedy is too strong or was administered too hastily, or that the tariffs will be too disruptive in the short term. This is not the time to debate how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. This is an emergency. We know what the problem is and we know how to address it. There is no time to waste.
President Trump has already shown that he can implement tariffs and other economic tools to reshape supply chains and reinvigorate manufacturing. When he deployed sweeping tariffs in his first term, not only did the sky not fall as pundits predicted, but inflation actually went down. And now that he is imposing tariffs even more broadly, inflation remains in check. A long-term problem won’t be fixed overnight, and the process may not always be smooth, but the situation demands strong and resolute action to strengthen the U.S. industrial base.
It took over 50 years from that first meeting at Bretton Woods until the creation of the W.T.O. It has been 30 years since. Fewer than 130 days from the beginning of the Trump Round, the Turnberry system is by no means complete, but its construction is well underway.
Ambassador Jamieson Greer is the U.S. trade representative.” [1]
1. Trump’s Trade Representative: Why We Remade the Global Order: Guest Essay. Jamieson Greer. New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Aug 7, 2025.
