The Trump Administration’s Trade Policy and the International Trading System

instance, the administration has touted its arrangement with Japan according to which Japan will invest more than $500 billion in the United States and will purchase $8 billion of U.S. goods. 93 In the end, these agreements may not resemble modern trade agreements at all.That complexity muddies the relationship between foreign affairs and foreign commerce in an already fraught legal environment.Over the last several years, the executive branch has sought to take advantage of what some see as blurry lines between international commerce, national security, and foreign policy to defend broad actions by agencies and by the president in international trade.The government was successful in the litigation that challenged President Trump's first-term trade actions.The president has blurred the lines even further in his second term by invoking IEEPA to institute a major global economic program.The lawfulness of using IEEPA to impose tariffs remains in doubt, as challenges to several of the president's recent actions wind their way through the courts.For the moment, however, the trade posture of the United States increasingly resembles a vortex of escalating and often unpredictable tariffs, punctuated by occasional informal agreements with particular trading partners.