In his second term, U.S. President Donald Trump has flipped the script on trade policy, slapping tariffs on allies and adversaries alike to punish perceived unfairness and to extract an array of concessions. He declared that the guiding logic of this new approach is reciprocity. On social media, he explained that “whatever Countries charge the United States of America, we will charge them—No more, no less!” U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer has called the United States’ new bilateral deals “agreements for reciprocal trade,” or ARTs, a reference to his boss’s most famous book on negotiation.
But the Trump administration’s approach is not reciprocity at all. It is coercive unilateralism dressed up as reciprocity. The United States has pursued reciprocal trade for the past 90 years, but what Trump is doing breaks from this tradition. Under the threat of tariffs and, in some cases, territorial expansion, the administration has pressured U.S. trading partners to accept unbalanced trade concessions. Washington’s goals are to rebalance trade by tilting the playing field in favor of U.S. firms and producers, to force partners to pay for what Trump perceives as past unfairness, and to realign trade policy with foreign policy goals that preserve U.S. hegemony. Other countries are expected to give a lot but get little in return.
The United States, however, cannot remake the entire international trading system on its own. Any structural change to the international order requires others to buy in to the vision that is being sold. U.S. trading partners may be willing to try to appease Trump in the short term, but they do have other trading options—and they are already starting to pursue alternatives to the United States. Trump will need to offer them a few carrots along with using sticks if he wants these trade arrangements to last. Otherwise, the trust and order that the United States built through decades of careful trade compromises will quickly run out. An “America first” trade policy will leave America behind.
UNFAIR AND UNBALANCED
The idea that reciprocity ought to order global commerce is not new. Since the 1930s, U.S. trade policy has been based on the idea that agreements should be in the interests of both parties.The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the founding charter of the modern trading system signed in 1947, called on countries to enter into “reciprocal and mutually advantageous arrangements.” Although determining reciprocity is always somewhat subjective because of the nature of concessions that countries must make on different products and services, the deals that the United States entered into over the past 90 years followed a meaningfully reciprocal logic. Canada, Mexico, and the United States each lowered tariffs nearly to zero in the North American Free Trade Agreement, for example, and South Korea and the United States agreed across several rounds of negotiations starting in 2006 to eliminate tariffs except for sensitive products such as U.S. light trucks and South Korean rice and beef. The United States viewed reciprocity as a balancing of offers and requests—an act of give and get—and structured its trade agenda around this principle.
The Trump administration claims to be restoring reciprocity. But the administration’s notion of reciprocity rests heavily on the “get” and less on the “give.” It is more like a reparations program. Trump believes that the United States has already made too many historical concessions, claiming that the United States has been “ripped off” by Europe, Japan, South Korea, and many other close U.S. allies for years because it has been buying their goods while also footing much of the bill for their security. Now it’s time to pay up. In exchange for not raising tariff rates to unprecedented levels, Washington is seeking to have these countries commit to massive investments in the United States to support U.S. reindustrialization. Japan, for instance, agreed in 2025 to invest $550 billion in the United States in areas such as critical minerals, energy, metals, pharmaceuticals, and semiconductors.
The Trump administration wants to unilaterally rebalance trade.
This distorted concept of reciprocity has led the Trump administration to reject trade deals that are strictly reciprocal—deals that in the past, Washington would have seen as major wins. When asked if the United States would match Vietnam’s offer to reduce all its tariffs in 2025, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick exclaimed that this would be a “terrible deal.”
Instead of negotiating mutually beneficial arrangements, the Trump administration wants to unilaterally rebalance trade. It blames past presidents for opening the U.S. market and hoping others would reciprocate, perhaps, as Greer has suggested, naively believing that “the rest of the world would become like us.” Tariffs are the most effective corrective mechanism. In this telling, reciprocity means that other countries must give more so that the United States can give less.
Trump is not the first policymaker to try to redefine reciprocity to address perceived unfairness in the trading system. In the 1980s, Congress called for a “new reciprocity” that would require other countries to open their markets in sectors in which the United States was becoming less competitive, particularly against Japan. In 1987, the House of Representatives passed an amendment to a trade bill that required unilateral retaliation against countries that ran large trade surpluses against the United States. (The amendment was eventually dropped after the bill stalled in the wake of that year’s stock market crash.) At the time, experts warned that breaking the established rules of trade would harm the United States because other countries would no longer be eager to trade with Washington. But today, Trump has abandoned reciprocity with little resistance because he commands absolute loyalty from the Republican Party and has made open threats to punish firms, such as Amazon, that have questioned his approach to trade policy.
HEADS I WIN, TAILS YOU LOSE
Trump’s version of reciprocity has meant negotiating deals that are unlike traditional U.S. trade agreements. In line with his general ethos of moving fast and breaking things, the deals he has struck have bypassed Congress—even though it holds the constitutional authority to regulate commerce with foreign countries, including setting tariff rates. These agreements also lack neutral enforcement mechanisms, making them less durable and more likely to be seen by trading partners as nonbinding. Although a small number of deals resemble the form of typical trade agreements, with detailed commitments to abide by global trade norms such as regulatory transparency, most are loose frameworks that merely set up space for future dialogue. This means that it is not obvious what compliance looks like, leaving room for the United States to claim a deal was breached and demand retaliation.
The United States is not actually lowering tariffs in these trade deals. Instead, it is offering to reduce tariffs from punitive levels to new baseline rates that Trump set on the so-called Liberation Day in April 2025. U.S. trading partners are being asked to give more access to their markets to U.S. firms and to accept more restrictions on their exports to the United States. Although the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Trump’s emergency tariffs were unconstitutional, the administration is working to find alternate tariff mechanisms to form the basis for the agreements it struck before February 2026.
The trade deals that the administration has struck are also about containing China. Many of the economic security provisions in these agreements are clearly directed at aligning U.S. partners with Washington’s trade policies on China and pulling them away from Beijing when possible. In its deal with Malaysia, for instance, the United States agreed to lower tariff rates from 24 percent (the rate it announced on Liberation Day) to 19 percent. The United States then threatened to reinstate the higher rate if Malaysia were to enter into a new bilateral trade agreement with “a country that jeopardizes essential U.S. interests.” It is not hard to realize that Washington was referring in this case to Beijing.
A traditional understanding of reciprocity involves considering the institutional capacities of every country involved. Trump’s trade agreements fail to do so. It is unclear how Cambodia or Malaysia, for example, will implement onerous export controls and investment screening. In the past, Washington would provide technical and financial assistance to help countries carry out their commitments. But now, the onus for compliance is placed entirely on U.S. trading partners. In some cases, such as screening investments for Chinese state influence, officials in developing countries are unlikely to be able to meet their obligations without more guidance and support from the United States.
GROWING FRUSTRATION
Countries still want to trade with the United States. But they are bristling at this new coercive unilateralism. Trading partners want a return to true reciprocity, not an extractive relationship in which the United States takes but extends little in return.
In interviews we conducted from 2024 to 2025 with trade diplomats across Europe and the Indo-Pacific, the United States’ trading partners understood that the system had fundamentally changed in the second Trump administration. Many of them agreed that more work could be done to reduce trade barriers, and they supported Washington’s goal of addressing challenges posed by China’s dominance in some sectors, such as steel and electric vehicles. But they preferred a collaborative rather than a unilateral effort. Regional and multilateral deals could more effectively take countries’ individual strategies and economic sensitivities into account than the United States’ current approach centered on unbalanced bilateral agreements. And trade officials were uniformly taken aback by Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs and the narrative that global trade policy has been stacked against the United States.
Trading partners want a return to true reciprocity, not an extractive relationship.
Trump’s policies are causing U.S. trade partners to adopt a two-pronged approach in response. In the short term, countries that face substantial penalties are attempting to give Trump what he wants to pacify him. They see no other choice. Officials in countries dealing with high tariffs argue that they must negotiate with Washington to avoid the massive economic disruption that would occur if the Trump administration followed through on its trade threats or to avoid jeopardizing their security dependencies on the United States. Officials we interviewed said their countries were willing to offer numerous concessions to appease Washington, including increased agricultural and liquified natural gas imports from the United States, more preferential treatment for U.S. investors, further enforcement of transshipment of Chinese products, and cooperation with the United States on obtaining critical minerals and strengthening supply chains.
But in the long term, if the United States continues to insist on coercive unilateralism over reciprocity, trade partners will find alternatives. Many have already done so. Countries in the Indo-Pacific, for instance, are deepening economic relations among themselves. This includes deals such as the Digital Economy Partnership Agreement, which provides rules to promote collaboration and boost trust around important issues such as emerging technologies, and the development of special economic zones to increase trade opportunities. According to statistics collected by UN Trade and Development, trade among countries in East Asia increased ten percent from the fourth quarter of 2024 to the third quarter of 2025.
These trends are global. The European Union has been negotiating comprehensive free-trade agreements and working with partners worldwide. Although Trump has struggled to secure a trade agreement with Brazil, the EU concluded a megaregional pact with Mercosur, which links two continental economic powerhouses. Even India, which has long been known for trade protectionism, has signed agreements with the European Union, New Zealand, Oman, and the United Kingdom. There is also interest among some countries in creating a new trade group outside the World Trade Organization to deepen trade ties and settle disputes. Such an organization would likely leave out the United States and China, which would help ensure that the new global rules of trade were written by middle powers.
A LOSING PROPOSITION
As Washington abandons reciprocity for coercive unilateralism, the biggest victim may be the United States itself. The administration’s insistence on using tariffs as its primary trade tool will raise costs for U.S. consumers and businesses and antagonize its friends and allies. And despite the bluster from the White House, the strategy has clear limits. The cost of using economic coercion against friends is higher than the value of the new market access that can be won through the administration’s patchwork of deals. When trade deals are truly reciprocal, U.S. partners are willing to provide market access and align their policies with Washington at a relatively low cost. But a coercive approach erodes partners’ domestic support for cooperation with the United States and increases political friction.
The Trump administration’s trade agenda is not only asymmetrical; it also fails to meet the moment. Countering China’s economic coercion requires a viable alternative that other countries can get behind. Yet Trump has largely wasted leverage on trading partners that were already willing to come to the table, including Japan, the United Kingdom, and Vietnam, and done little to convince some of the largest markets—Brazil, China, and India—to seriously negotiate. And the United States is losing leverage because its attempt to go it alone on trade has encouraged the rest of the world to cooperate more, not less, giving countries more alternatives to Washington.
The United States’ trading partners still welcome a chance to turn current conversations into concrete trade discussions, provided that Washington is willing to work with them on fairer terms. If Trump insists on coercion, they will find other avenues. As the Trump administration deconstructs reciprocity to tilt bilateral trade relations in the United States’ favor, it is leading the rest of the world to rediscover reciprocity and work to strengthen it.
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