Ep. 13 – WITA’s Friday Exchange: Intractable or Inevitable – Reaching a Trade Deal with India

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.

Mark Linscott is a Senior Advisor with the US India Strategic Partnership Forum (USISPF), leading efforts to advance US-India trade. He also serves as a Senior Advisor at The Asia Group and a Nonresident Senior Fellow with the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center.

Previously, Linscott was Assistant U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) for South and Central Asian Affairs from December 2016 to December 2018, serving as the U.S. government lead in developing trade policy with countries across South and Central Asia. He led efforts in the bilateral Trade Policy Forum with India and in Trade and Investment Framework Agreements (TIFAs) with Central Asia, Bangladesh, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.

From 2012 to 2016, Linscott served as Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for World Trade Organization (WTO) and Multilateral Affairs, coordinating U.S. trade policies in the WTO. He and his team led negotiations in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) on customs matters, government procurement, subsidies and trade remedies, and technical barriers to trade, and he represented the United States in trade meetings of the G-20 and the OECD.

Linscott was Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Environment and Natural Resources from October 2003 to March 2012, overseeing all trade and environment issues for USTR, including in free trade agreement negotiations such as the TPP and in the WTO and OECD. During this period, he developed a robust agenda on illegal logging and associated trade through Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) and bilateral agreements with Indonesia and China.

From 1996 to 2002, Linscott represented the United States at the U.S. Mission to the WTO in Geneva and was a founding member of the WTO Pension Fund Management Board. Prior to Geneva, he worked in the Office of WTO and Multilateral Affairs at USTR in Washington, where he concluded the Uruguay Round Government Procurement Agreement as the lead U.S. negotiator.

Linscott began his career at the Department of Commerce, serving from 1985 to 1988 in Import Administration and from 1988 to 1992 in the Office of Multilateral Affairs. He was awarded a Gold Medal Award, the Commerce Department’s highest honor, for his work on the 1986 Canadian softwood lumber investigation.

Linscott holds a BA in economics from the University of Virginia and a JD from Georgetown University Law Center. He and his wife, Karen, live in Washington, DC, where he tinkers on his café racer motorcycles and paddles on the Potomac.

Sharon Bomer Lauritsen is the founder of AgTrade Strategies LLC, a consulting service focused on U.S. agricultural trade policies. She retired from the U.S. government in 2020 with 29 years of experience, most recently as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Agricultural Affairs and Commodity Policy, Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, Executive Office the President.

Sharon served at USTR for 15 years, leading agriculture trade negotiations for the United States, including with Canada, China, the European Union, India, Japan, Mexico, South Korea and at the World Trade Organization.

She also worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Marketing Service (USDA’s AMS) for 10 years in senior management positions.

Previously, she worked for five years leading the agriculture section of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization. She started her career in government relations for the United Fresh Produce Association.

Joe Damond’s career spans more than 40 years in both the government and private sectors in Washington. He served 16 years as a trade official at the Department of Commerce and the Office of the United States Trade Representative, which included a diverse set of responsibilities. Most notably, for seven years as deputy assistant United States trade representative for Asia and the Pacific, he was responsible for executing United States trade policy with Southeast Asia and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum and served as chief negotiator of bilateral trade agreements with Laos and Cambodia and the historic Bilateral Trade Agreement with Vietnam, which was concluded in 2000. He also served as the chair of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Committee on Trade and Investment. Mr. Damond then spent more than 20 years in the private sector, holding senior positions in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors focused on international trade and health policy issues and global government affairs, and representing the sector during numerous bilateral and global trade agreements. In addition, he has spent the last four years as a consultant on healthcare and trade policy issues, representing both private sector and government clients with a focus on Asia and Europe. He is the author of Give Trade a Chance: The Negotiation of the U.S.-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement.