Ep. 10 – WITA’s Friday Exchange: Beyond Tariffs and Multilateral Pieties

Ignacio García Bercero is a Senior Fellow at Bruegel. He specialises in trade policy and its relationship with regulatory policies and other global policies.

He covers the reform of multilateral trade institutions, new trends in bilateral trade policies, relationships between strategic partners and the interface between trade, climate policies and economic security issues.

He speaks English, Spanish and French.

He is a Visiting Professor in the Department of Political Science of University College London. Previously, he was a Fellow at St. Anthony’s College, Oxford, where his research focused on World Trade Organization (WTO) reform. His work in the European Commission included contributing to the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations. In the WTO, he served as Head of legal affairs and dispute settlement, Counsellor in the Delegation to the UN and Chief Negotiator for free trade agreements with South Korea, India and the United States. He has also overseen relations with Mediterranean countries on trade and sustainable development. His last position in the Commission was Director for strategy, multilateral affairs and economic analysis. Ignacio holds a LLM from University College London.

Tailwind Global Strategies LLC provides strategic advice and advocacy on global government relations matters, with a focus on international trade and regulatory issues. Its Principal and Founder Bruce Hirsh has nearly three decades of experience developing and implementing solutions to complex global problems both in the United States and internationally. With the benefit of 18 years in leadership positions in the Executive Branch and Congress, he understands how to work at the nexus of policy, process, and personalities to advance solutions and achieve results for businesses seeking to expand their footprint in key markets and achieve their policy priorities.

In a challenging and unpredictable period for companies who trade internationally, Tailwind provides reliable interpretations of the latest developments and their consequences for clients’ bottom lines, and advises clients on how best to minimize risk and maximize business opportunities. In doing so, Tailwind draws on Bruce’s deep knowledge of substantive trade and regulatory issues, as well as U.S. and international policy-making institutions. Over the course of his government career, Bruce developed U.S. government positions, initiatives and legislation on a variety of topics and built broad-based coalitions in the WTO, APEC and elsewhere to advance initiatives internationally.

Prior to establishing Tailwind, Bruce worked as Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Japan, Korea, and APEC, where he negotiated Japan-related provisions of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement and represented the United States at Senior Official meetings under APEC and the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement. He also developed and successfully executed strategies for addressing market access and regulatory hurdles in collaboration with private sector stakeholders. As Deputy Assistant USTR for WTO and Multilateral Affairs, he was lead U.S. negotiator for WTO Trade Facilitation, helping to set up the successful conclusion of the first multilateral WTO agreement in two decades, the Trade Facilitation Agreement.

From 2011 to 2014, Bruce was Chief International Trade Counsel for the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance, where he was Chairman Max Baucus’s principal advisor on international trade and economic matters and advised Members of the Committee and the Democratic Caucus on these issues. In that role, he negotiated the Baucus-Camp trade promotion authority legislation.

Bruce also served at USTR as Chief Counsel for Dispute Settlement and as Legal Advisor to the U.S. Mission to the WTO in Geneva, Switzerland. Before joining USTR in 1998, he practiced law in Washington, DC and Tokyo, Japan.

Drawing on this broad-ranging experience, Tailwind offers personalized assistance to companies to help them navigate complex international issues.

Maria L. Pagan is an American attorney who served as the US Ambassador to the World Trade Organization in the Biden administration.

She also served as US Deputy Trade Representative. Pagan was formerly the Deputy General Counsel in the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR), working on trade negotiations, agreements, and regulations.

From 1993 to 2003, Pagan was an attorney advisor in the Office of the Chief Counsel for International Commerce at the US Department of Commerce. She then joined the USTR where she provided legal counsel and litigated disputes before the World Trade Organization.

Pagan is a graduate from Tufts University and has a Juris Doctor and Masters of Science in Foreign Service from Georgetown University.

Dawn Shackleford is the President of Looking Glass Trade, LLC, providing strategic trade policy solutions for complex international trade challenges. She is a Director-at-Large on ANSI’s Board of Directors and a member of ANSI’s International Policy Advisory Group. Dawn was awarded the Association of Women in International Trade’s 2025 Government Service Award due to her long and distinguished career with the U.S. government, serving the United States and representing U.S. companies in the global trade space. She served as the Executive Director for Trade Agreements Policy & Negotiations at the U.S. Department of Commerce, International Trade Administration from 2022 to 2025. In this capacity she oversaw Commerce Department engagement in multilateral trade institutions to help U.S. exporters, monitoring and import licensing of steel and aluminum trade to help U.S. importers and domestic industry, 232 related matters in cooperation with the Bureau of Industry & Security, and the facilitation of the U.S. Foreign Trade Zones program to bring jobs and manufacturing to the United States. Prior to this position, Dawn served in various positions in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative from 2004 to 2022, including as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for the Office of Southeast Asia and the Pacific where she served as senior official for the Trade Pillar of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) negotiations, the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for WTO and Multilateral Affairs where she served as senior official for WTO, OECD, G20 and G7 engagement, and the Deputy Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for India, Nepal and Bhutan. She also served as the lead U.S. negotiator for the WTO Trade Facilitation Agreement, the customs and trade facilitation chapter of the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership Agreement, multiple WTO accession negotiations, and the government procurement chapters in the U.S. FTA negotiations with Oman and the United Arab Emirates. She also worked on various WTO, OECD, APEC, G20, and UN trade policy issues. Ms. Shackleford was elected to an international leadership position as the first female chairperson of the Trade Committee of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) from 2020 to 2021. From 1998 to 2004 Ms. Shackleford served as a policy analyst within the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and in the Department of the Navy. From 2003 to 2005 she served as an adjunct professor at American University’s School of International Service. She holds a Master of Arts Degree in International Affairs from American University in Washington, DC, a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Politics from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and studied at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, Germany.