WITA’s Friday Exchange: The Cost of Chaos: Tariffs, Tactics, and is the Juice Worth the Squeeze?
In the latest episode of the Friday Exchange, our trade insiders bring the heat! This week’s episode goes beyond a recap, it’s a full-on debate about the future of U.S. trade policy. Is Washington playing a high-stakes game to rebuild supply chains and outmaneuver non-market economies, or is it simply overplaying its hand?
We also explore the ripple effects: smaller companies feeling pressure, investors weighing uncertainty, and the challenge of navigating overlapping tariffs and evolving policies. At the same time, we look at pockets of progress from targeted negotiations and efforts to strengthen domestic capacity and supply chain resilience.
In a trade environment defined by uncertainty, urgency, and high political stakes, one question looms large: Is this strategy worth the cost?
Featured Speakers:
Introduction: Kenneth Levinson, CEO, WITA – The International Trade Association
Blake Harden, Managing Director, Washington Council Ernst & Young; former Trade Counsel on the House Ways & Means Committee; and former Senior Attorney in the Office of the Chief Counsel at US Customs and Border Protection
Daniel Mullaney, Non-Resident Senior Fellow, Atlantic Council; former Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Europe and the Middle East
Chris Padilla, Senior Advisor, Brunswick Group; former Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade
Stephen Vaughn, Partner, International Trade, King & Spalding LLP; former General Counsel, Office of the United States Trade Representative under first Trump Administration
Watch the Video on YouTube | Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
Recorded at 9:00 AM US/ET on 04/10/2026 | WITA
Op-Ed by Ambassador Jamieson Greer: Another Fish Story From the WTO
This piece by Jamieson Greer, the United States Trade Representative, was published on the USTR website after originally appearing in the Wall Street Journal.
The World Trade Organization isn’t a serious forum. That’s what I was thinking as I sat through the triumphant finale of the four-hour opening session of the 14th Ministerial Conference in Yaoundé, Cameroon, on March 26. The WTO’s leadership was playing a self-congratulatory song about progress on an incomplete agreement on fisheries subsidies. I tried in vain to gauge the reactions of other trade ministers, but comparatively few had even bothered to make the trip. The U.S. government assessed that only a couple dozen cabinet-level trade ministers attended, with the majority of attendees represented by vice ministers or lower-ranked delegates. As WTO staff bopped to the beat, I grew concerned about how productive the next three days would be.
I arrived a skeptic of the WTO and left even more so. The organization was established in 1995 with the aspiration to create certainty for trade based on common market-based rules. It has been on a path to irrelevance for some time and has even undermined U.S. interests. The WTO system helped create a world in which China dominates global manufacturing and our trading partners maintain high trade barriers with impunity. Because of their self-declared status as “developing” economies, about three-fourths of members aren’t obligated to follow some of the agreed-on trade rules, and they constantly seek carve-outs from new ones. Multilateral negotiations have been lackluster for years. The WTO dispute-settlement system devolved into a forum for endless litigation, which prevented countries from combating unfair trade practices, rarely led to compliance, and served as a disincentive to settle disagreements.
The WTO is ineffective and dysfunctional. Take one example: WTO members since 1998 have refrained from imposing tariffs on electronic products—like software and music—that can be transmitted digitally. Even though this approach has become the default practice globally, the WTO still goes through a performative renewal of this “e-commerce moratorium” on digital tariffs every two years. Doing so consumes enormous time and energy, and many members hold the renewal hostage to trade away for unrelated objectives.
The U.S. and 24 co-sponsoring countries this year proposed a common-sense reform: Instead of settling for another two-year renewal, members should agree to a permanent e-commerce moratorium. That would prevent future ministerial conferences from wasting time on a nonissue while demonstrating that the WTO could have a role in future trade negotiations. But even this proposal—the lowest-hanging fruit—wasn’t picked up.
04/08/2026 | Ambassador Jamieson Greer | Office of the U.S. Trade Representative
Trade Explainer: EU-CPTPP Cooperation and The Search For New Coalitions
The latest World Trade Organization (WTO) ministerial conference (MC14) in Yaoundé, Cameroon, ended on a note of frustration. The conference ran nearly two days beyond its scheduled close, and participants still failed to finalize key texts. The resulting “Yaoundé package” is narrower than the outcome of MC13 in Abu Dhabi, producing only draft or incomplete texts on WTO reform, multilateral e-commerce, fisheries subsidies, non-violation complaints under the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), and elements of the Least Developed Countries (LDC) package.
Yet, the gathering was not totally devoid of announcements. Ministers from the EU and the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) agreed to accelerate work toward a digital trade agreement, confirming a growing conviction among middle powers that meaningful rulemaking on trade—especially digital trade—will increasingly take place outside the WTO’s consensus machinery.
This explainer provides an overview of the CPTPP and outlines EU-CPTPP digital trade cooperation.
What is the CPTPP and why is the EU interested in it?
The CPTPP is a large free-trade area linking 12 countries across the Indo-Pacific and beyond. It includes Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and Vietnam.
The grouping, which aimed at setting high-standard trade rules for the global economy, began as a small Pacific trade pact and later expanded into the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Washington helped shape those rules and President Barack Obama signed the agreement, but President Donald Trump withdrew the United States upon taking office in his first term. The remaining members later revived the deal as the CPTPP.
04/08/2026 | Antonia Wunnerlich | The German Marshall Fund of the United States
A Delicate Balance
The EU–US trade deal makes it through.
“Strong, if not perfect” was European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s verdict on the trade deal hammered out between the United States and the European Union (EU) and signed at Turnberry, Scotland, in July 2025. Nothing is perfect, of course—but the carefully hedged endorsement has appeared increasingly prophetic as the deal overcame hurdles and was finally voted through by the European Parliament’s International Trade Committee on March 19, 2026, by 29 votes to 9, and by the wider Parliament on March 26, by 417 votes to 154.
The road to passing was not a smooth one. Formally titled the Agreement on Reciprocal, Fair, and Balanced Trade, the inclusion of “reciprocal” has attracted skepticism, and the deal has lurched through suspension, legal crisis, and political tug-of-war in the last year. After the deal passed a full plenary vote on March 26, Rapporteur Bernd Lange (S&D, DE) said:
With today’s vote, we have a strong mandate for negotiations with the Council and we intend to make the most of it. MEPs will only be able to sign up to the trade terms of the deal if the regulation contains very strong and clear safeguards, and only after the US has fully respected the terms of the deal. I intend to defend this mandate firmly in the negotiations.
Tensions on either side of the Atlantic have hampered the deal’s progress: in the States, in late February, SCOTUS struck down the executive’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the legal mechanism underpinning Washington’s ability to hold tariffs at the agreed 15% ceiling with the EU. Even prior to this, however, in January the European Parliament’s trade committee halted work in protest at President Trump’s rhetoric over Greenland.
04/05/2026 | Dr. Jake Scott | The Foundation for Economic Education
How Open Economies Lead to Open Minds
The following is an excerpt:
Survey data can shed light on the relationship between trade and attitudes toward others. A study of international survey data published by the Brookings Institution found that feelings of national superiority and chauvinism were positively associated with opposition to global trade across multiple countries. On the flip side, pro-trade attitudes and greater exposure to global markets are negatively associated with nationalism, ethnocentrism, and prejudice.
For example, negative attitudes among Americans toward outsourcing appear to be associated with an “us versus them” mentality. According to a study by political scientists Edward Mansfield and Diana Mutz, switching from the most isolationist to the least isolationist outlooks predicted a fivefold increase in support for outsourcing. Shifting from the least ethnocentric to the most ethnocentric attitudes predicted a 50 percent decrease in support for outsourcing. And changing from the least nationalistic to the most nationalistic views predicted a 25 percent decrease in support for outsourcing..
…Protectionist restrictions can exacerbate prejudicial attitudes. As the late economist Walter Williams explained, anti-competitive regulation “lowers the private cost of discriminating against the racially less-preferred person.” But when there is money to be made, trading only with groups who look or think like you doesn’t seem so important. And the more you trade with different groups, the more you realize that maybe, just maybe, they aren’t as bad as you thought.
But let’s go a step further. Researchers at the University of British Columbia and Bates College have also shown how trade can break down prejudice in practice. The researchers examined areas along the Silk Roads, a network of trade routes throughout Eurasia that has been used for over millennia. It turns out that areas within 50 kilometers of the Silk Roads today have higher economic activity compared to those that are 50–100 kilometers away. No real surprise there. But more importantly for our purposes, the former areas also have higher rates of intergroup marriage. It’s hard to find a better example of tolerance than asking someone of another ethnic group to become family and spend the rest of their lives with you.
04/07/2026 | Walker Wright | Human Progress
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