Lori Wallach’s enduring influence on US trade policy

The fondness is reciprocated. Wallach refers to Tai as “the unicorn USTR for this moment.” She praises Tai for being “the unusual person who knows about the WTO and free trade agreements and anti-dumping law, and, and, and … she led the renegotiation of NAFTA under Trump, which had the biggest majority support in the history of trade agreements.” She adds that Tai is “incredibly strong and formidable.”

Wallach’s influence now transcends partisan politics. Though a Democrat, Wallach also had the ear of another trade skeptic, Robert Lighthizer, who served as USTR in Trump’s Republican administration.

Yet, one criticism of Wallach which has dogged her from the start, and seems no less relevant today, is that for all her success in upending policies or negotiations she does not favor, she doesn’t have much of a track record in building policy that advances trade while protecting the communities she seeks to defend. We know what she doesn’t want, but we are less certain about what she wants.

Wallach now counts a long list of trade advancements she has helped to stop in their tracks: the Trans-Pacific Partnership, global rules for digital trade, and political support for intellectual property protection, among others. Deliberately or not, Wallach has shaped a more inward-looking, nationalistic America, one in which commercial engagement with the outside world has been replaced with largely unsuccessful calls for its trading partners to tie their commerce policy to non-trade standards set by the United States.

Ironically, the multilateral architecture which Wallach helped to undermine had provided her with a platform to project her global profile. While her power inside Washington has grown, it seems increasingly hard to imagine how she might cast this power beyond the Beltway as multilateralism crumbles. The risk for her, as with many Beltway insiders, is that she becomes just another powerful courtier in the endless theater of Washington’s political kabuki.

For all the lessons that Wallach learned and has taught over three decades at the heart of US trade policy, she appears to have missed a key one: All negotiations, if they are to result in agreement, require compromise.

Download Keith Rockwell’s full paper here. The transcript of the interview is here.

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