Could Javier Milei (who‘s been at Mar-a-Lago) be the foreign statesman capable of turning Trump into more of Free Trader?

@BiasForAction Trade has always had strings attached, that‘s why FTAs were negotiated and not just imposed by the President. Because strings were attached by Congress.
Of course hyper-globalization will be coming back, digital trade is booming and new technologies will facilitate drastic increases for trade in services.
Globalization has already restructured global manufacturing and services will be next with or without trade deals in place. People, companies and technology will leap even if governments dither.
Will the political support for new FTAs return? Sure! Free trade is a sound policy just as any other neoliberal reform. After they were dismissed for 50 years in between the 1930s and 1980 Reagan re-introduced them because structural reforms will always be tools to enhance prosperity. The same applies to FTAs. Economically illiterate populism might inhibit sound ideas but it will never kill them.

Trump has already negotiated more FTAs and trade agreements than Biden. He re-negotiated KORUS and turned NAFTA into the USMCA, in certain respects those negotiations liberalized these three bilateral trade relationships even further. He initiated FTA negotiations with the UK and Kenya, concluded a trade agreement with Japan and launched negations with the EU and China.
Biden‘s done nothing akin to that.

@CedricH there are currently no new FTA under development under Biden nor will there be under Trump. Trump renegotiated NAFTA to attach more strings. That trend will continue. Not sure what point you’re making other than to defend free trade. I like free trade too. Go for it. But the world has changed since the heydays of FTAs — which is why nobody uses the term FTA anymore. Is there anything I posted that you agree with or are you just trying to extol the virtues of trade? Cause I’m for trade.

@BiasForAction I disagree with your analysis that the heydays of globalization and free trade are over. You‘re pointing to the decline in the trade for manufactured goods relative to global GDP. That‘s not a good indicator for the state or future of globalization since trade in absolute terms is still growing robustly. The maturing of the Chinese domestic economy is part of the reason why trade, relative to GDP has stagnated. The Chinese economy has shifted away (around 2008) from growing itself entirely through an expansion of trade and the Chinese GDP growth is now increasingly disconnected from the growth of their exports.

Everyone in the trade community uses the term FTA. It‘s a technical term.

Again, Trump‘s so called strings were mostly meant to open the Mexican, Canadian and Korean economy further. They lowered certain trade barriers, meaning they liberalized trade.
Again, Biden cancelled negotiations that were launched by the Trump administration. There‘s no reason not to think that those will be revived by the Trump administration.