From the days of Alexander Hamilton to the trade wars of Donald Trump, trade policy has been a key instrument of American power and wealth. The open trading system that the United States sponsored after the Second World War serves US interests by promoting cooperation and prosperity, but also allows the allies to become more independent and China to rise. The case studies in Trade and American Leadership examine how the value of preferential trade programs is undercut by the multilateral liberalization that the United States promoted for generations, and how trade sanctions tend either to be too economically costly to impose or too modest to matter. These problems are exacerbated by a domestic political system in which the gains from trade are unevenly distributed, power is fragmented, and strategies are easily undermined. Trade and American Leadership places special emphasis on today's challenges, and the rising danger of economic nationalism.

An authority on Asia and globalization identifies the challenges China's growing power poses and how it must be confronted When China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, most experts expected the WTO rules and procedures to liberalize China and make it "a responsible stakeholder in the liberal world order." But the experts made the wrong bet. China today is liberalizing neither economically nor politically but, if anything, becoming more authoritarian and mercantilist. In this book, notably free of partisan posturing and inflammatory rhetoric, renowned globalization and Asia expert Clyde Prestowitz describes the key challenges posed by China and the strategies America and the Free World must adopt to meet them. He argues that these must be more sophisticated and more comprehensive than a narrowly targeted trade war. Rather, he urges strategies that the United States and its allies can use unilaterally without contravening international or domestic law.