WITA’s Friday Exchange: Bangladesh Leads the Way; the Next Phase of U.S.-China Trade; and Congress Wags its Finger
In the latest episode of the Friday Exchange, our former trade negotiators unpack the emerging U.S.-Bangladesh trade agreement. Did Bangladesh secure more favorable terms than India’s interim deal with the U.S.? What are the implications for other deals in Southeast Asia, Latin America and elsewhere?
They also examine the administration’s broader trade strategy. Particularly, what it hopes to achieve with China, and whether the U.S.-China trade truce could last well into the future. Will new aircraft and energy purchases, critical minerals commitments, or new inbound Chinese investment shape the next phase of bilateral trade? And they discuss if it means anything that Congress started to reassert its Constitutional prerogatives
Introduction: Kenneth Levinson, CEO, WITA – The International Trade Membership Association
Wendy Cutler, Senior Vice President, Asia Society Policy Institute; former Acting Deputy U.S. Trade Representative
Mark Linscott, Senior Advisor at the Asia Group and the US-India Strategic Partnership Forum; former Assistant USTR for South and Central Asia and before that WTO and Multilateral Affairs
Chris Padilla, Senior Advisor, Brunswick Group; former Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade
Moderator: Joe Damond, Chair of International Trade Policy & Global Life Sciences, Crowell Global Advisors; former Deputy Assistant USTR for Asia
Watch the Video on YouTube | Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
Recorded at 9:00 AM US/ET on 02/12/2026 | WITA
WITA’s WTO Matters Series:
MC 14 and WTO Reform–Part 2
Featured Speakers:
Ambassador Sung-yo Choi, Deputy Permanent Representative of the Republic of Korea to the World Trade Organization
Ambassador Salomon Eheth, Permanent Mission of the Republic of Cameroon to the World Trade Organization
Ambassador João Machado, Permanent Representative of the European Union to the World Trade Organization
Ambassador Guilherme de Aguiar Patriota, Permanent Representative of Brazil to the World Trade Organization; Deputy Permanent Representative of Brazil to the United Nations
Ambassador Mzukisi Qobo, Permanent Representative of South Africa to the World Trade Organization
Moderator: Angela Ellard, Senior Advisor (non-resident), Center for Strategic and International Studies; former Deputy Director General, World Trade Organization
Watch the Full Event Video Here
02/13/2026 | WITA
How 2025’s US Tariff Shocks Can Give Way to Constructive Reforms in 2026
The Trump administration’s trade policy over the course of 2025 had the split-screen character of a medieval diptych. The panel to the left, drawing most viewers’ attention, displays unpredictable, ever-changing, and erratic threats of unheard-of levels of tariffs, sometimes threatened over issues unrelated to trade. With this aggressive tariff approach, the White House ignored both preexisting agreements on tariff levels and long-standing obligations to treat trading partners equally.
The panel to the right, by contrast, represents a quest for sound trade-related policy outcomes that are long-standing US objectives often shared by other trading partners. These objectives are largely reasonable and arguably necessary for a sustainable international trading system. This right-hand panel is represented in bilateral trade agreements over the past year and in official statements, such as the administration’s December communication to the World Trade Organization (WTO) on reforming the institution.
For most of 2025 and early 2026, the right-hand panel’s sober, nuanced, and solid prescriptions for fairer trade and a sustainable world trading system were overshadowed by the shocking and sometimes disturbing tariffs and tariff threats in the left-hand panel.
This can and should change in 2026. True, US tariff levels are much higher than previously agreed rates, and the levies discriminate among trading partners. But US tariffs are relatively stable now and generally stand at levels that allow trade to continue. In addition, the power of tariffs as a policy tool has likely diminished since the beginning of 2025, given that the United States has issued a significant and increasing number of tariff exemptions and has not followed through on many of its initial tariff threats over the past year. The Trump administration’s short-lived threat of 10 percent tariffs on several European partners over the recent Greenland dispute, for instance, although shocking, points to the weakening of tariffs as a tool; Trump withdrew the threat without any real concessions from Europe. In part, the administration’s walking back on tariff threats is likely due to the predicted negative effects of tariffs on prices, US manufacturing, and the stock and bond markets. It is also a product of subsequent deals, such as those the White House has recently announced that include tariff reductions with India, Guatemala, and El Salvador.
02/09/2026 | Daniel Mullaney | Atlantic Council
A New Global Economic Governance – Perspectives for International Cooperation
In July 1944, tucked away in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, negotiators from 44 countries sought to achieve something improbable and entirely without precedent: the creation of a global economic architecture based not on power, but on mutually agreed rules and on cooperation rather than coercion.
At the onset of the meeting, the outcome of the Second World War was largely a foregone conclusion. Fierce fighting continued in Europe and in the Pacific, but the conflict had tilted decidedly in the direction of the allies. Leaders in Washington and London had devoted considerable thought to the political and economic origins of the war and were determined to avert a recurrence of that horrific confrontation. Their goal was a new paradigm in which every country had a stake and in which quarrels would be resolved before they escalated.
But this Anglo-Saxon blueprint – in which the United States was indispensable – soon proved too narrow to accommodate the interests of an ever-larger group of governments. This was particularly true with respect to rules governing international trade. Almost as soon as the multilateral trading system was created, cracks generated by political pressures appeared. As the global network of rules expanded and the number of participating countries swelled, these cracks were covered up but never fully repaired
America’s Long-Term Skepticism
For a time, the system functioned well enough, enduring as long as members, not least the United States, could accept its principles and rules. But doubts were sown in Washington at an early stage and US skepticism of the system’s value grew. Trade is a political issue in all corners of the world, but in the United States, a country with a far smaller dependency on trade than its European or Asian counterparts, trade has a toxic edge
02/12/2026 | Keith M. Rockwell | Konrad Adenauer Foundation
Could U.S.-Mexico Critical Minerals Deal Really Be a Technology Sovereignty Play?
Fifty-four countries showed up. The United States proposed a global trading bloc. The European Union, Japan, and a growing coalition of nations signed cooperation frameworks for critical minerals. But the most consequential development from the February 4 Critical Minerals Ministerial was also the most understated: a one-page bilateral action plan between the United States and Mexico that, if executed, would embed the physical substrate of every exponential technology into the USMCA framework.
The plan gives both countries 60 days to develop coordinated trade policies, price floors, and joint investment frameworks for the minerals that power AI chips, electric vehicle batteries, semiconductor fabrication equipment, and advanced defense systems. On its face, it appears to be a mining agreement. It is not. It is a technology sovereignty play wrapped inside a trade negotiation. And how Mexico responds over the next two months will determine whether North America builds the physical foundation for its next technological era, or whether this becomes another nearshoring moment: enormous in promise, underwhelming in execution.
What the Action Plan Actually Says
The official text is one page. Its scope is not. The U.S. and Mexico will identify specific critical minerals of mutual interest, explore border-adjusted price floors for imports, and consult on embedding those mechanisms into a binding plurilateral agreement open to other allied nations. The plan extends to regulatory standards for mining and processing, geological mapping coordination between the U.S. Geological Survey and the Mexican Geological Service, coordinated stockpiling, investment screening, and joint rapid-response protocols for supply-chain disruptions.
Both governments framed this explicitly in the context of the USMCA Joint Review, due by July 1. The language from both sides treats critical minerals not as a side conversation but as a structural pillar of the North American trade relationship going forward, with Ebrard positioning mineral security as inseparable from industrial competitiveness and national strategy.
The timing reinforces that reading. Two days earlier, President Trump signed an executive order establishing Project Vault, a $12 billion critical-mineral stockpile structured as a public-private partnership, with initial participation from Boeing, GE Vernova, Western Digital, and Clarios. China’s restriction of rare-earth exports during the 2025 trade war demonstrated the very vulnerability this architecture is designed to address. As the USMCA review is underway, critical minerals could become part of the trilateral trade framework itself rather than an ancillary arrangement.
02/09/2026 | Dr. Daniel Covarrubias | Rio Grande Guardian
Barrels, Bytes, and Border Taxes: India’s U.S. Trade Bargain
Trade agreements are meant to reduce uncertainty. The new U.S.–India framework does something more 2020s: it tries to tame the tail risk – the chance that geopolitics, not economics, suddenly re-prices India’s access to its most important export market.
That matters because Washington’s trade policy has changed character. Under Executive Order 14257, the United States explicitly treats large and persistent goods trade deficits as a national emergency – citing a U.S. goods deficit that reached $1.2 trillion in 2024 – and uses emergency-style tariff authority as the baseline, not the endgame. The joint statement with India then operationalizes that doctrine: the U.S. applies a reciprocal tariff rate of 18% to a set of Indian exports, while offering an off-ramp – selective tariff removals for “aligned partner” categories – if the interim agreement is successfully concluded.
From a textbook free-trade lens, this is messy: conditionality, discretion, and snapback logic. From a strategic trade lens, it is legible – and India’s choice is more defensible than critics will admit. India is not “surrendering” to a tariff-first America; it is negotiating inside the new regime to extract three things that matter for India’s next growth phase: (i) de-escalation insurance, (ii) targeted market access for high-value clusters, and (iii) a politically protected channel for capital- and technology-deepening imports (aircraft, compute, energy).
The bullish case, then, is not that this is a beautiful agreement. It’s that it is a pragmatic re-rating mechanism: India is buying stability in the U.S. market while turning part of the price (import rebalancing) into productivity-enhancing inputs. The caution is that the same machinery that reduces tail risk today can normalize leverage tomorrow – especially through the Russia–energy linkage.
02/07/2026 | Sharan Banerjee | Linkedin
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