The Curious Incident of the Trade Deals in the Nighttime
About those best offers...
INSPECTOR GREGORY: Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?
SHERLOCK HOLMES: To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.
GREGORY: The dog did nothing in the night-time.
HOLMES: That was the curious incident.1
As a general rule, the news business operates on what happens. Elon Musk and Donald Trump are fighting — that’s news! The Supreme Court is issuing rulings — that is also definitely news! Russia is attacking Ukraine — unfortunately, that too qualifies as news.
On occasion, however, the non-event, the absence of action, is also very much newsworthy. When something that was expected to happen does not happen, that is a phenomenon that also merits coverage.
This brings us, dear readers, to this past Monday, when U.S. Trade Representative Jameson Greer apparently sent a letter to U.S. trade partners reminding them that the Liberation Day tariffs from back in April were merely paused — some deals need to be struck! According to Reuters’ Jarrett Renshaw:
The Trump administration wants countries to provide their best offer on trade negotiations by Wednesday as officials seek to accelerate talks with multiple partners ahead of a self-imposed deadline in just five weeks, according to a draft letter to negotiating partners seen by Reuters….
The document suggests an urgency within the administration to complete deals against its own tight deadline. While officials such as White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett have repeatedly promised that several agreements were nearing completion, so far only one agreement has been reached with a major U.S. trading partner: Britain. Even that limited pact was more akin to a framework for ongoing talks than a final deal.
In the draft, the U.S. is asking countries to list their best proposals in a number of key areas, including tariff and quota offers for purchase of U.S. industrial and agricultural products and plans to remedy any non-tariff barriers.
Other requested items include any commitments on digital trade and economic security, along with country-specific commitments, according to the letter.
The U.S. will evaluate the responses within days and offer "a possible landing zone" that could include a reciprocal tariff rate, according to the letter.
It was unclear which countries would receive the letter, but it was directed at those with active negotiations that included meetings and exchanges of documents. Washington has been engaged in such talks with the European Union, Japan, Vietnam and India, among others.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed the Reuters report the following day, according to the New York Post’s Seven Nelson and Diana Glebova:
President Trump has given countries a Wednesday deadline to make their best offers on trade — with the White House calling it a “deadline” to submit offers to avoid massive reciprocal tariffs due to take effect on July 8.
The office of the US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer sent a letter, first reported Monday by Reuters, “to all of our trading partners just to give them a friendly reminder that the deadline is coming up,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed at her Tuesday briefing.
Greer, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick “are in talks with many of our key trading partners around the globe… and they continue to be engaged in those discussions. And this letter was simply to remind these countries that the deadline is approaching and the President expects good deals, and we are on track for that,” Leavitt said….
Thus far, Trump has reached deals-in-principle with China and the UK, though neither has been formally drafted and ratified — as a court battle rages over the legality of the reciprocal levies.
The Post has Leavitt as “reminding,” the New Republic frames it as Leavitt “begging” — the point is, Wednesday has now come and gone.
If there is a safe assumption to make in Donald Trump’s Washington, it is that any country that submitted some sweet, sweet trade concessions would be the object of a White House victory lap to demonstrate the wisdom of the entire Liberation Day exercise.
So I checked the USTR news page to see if there were any announcements and… nothing. I checked out their fact sheet page and… still nothing. I have scoured the news pages and found… no new trade concessions to report over the last 48 hours.2 And I looked at the specialty trade publications and found nothing to suggest the United States has received a really good offer on anything.
The only things I was able to find? Reports suggesting that the Trump administration is scaling back its ambitions. There is this from the New York Times’ Christine Zhang:
In April, administration officials vowed to sign trade deals with as many as 90 countries in 90 days. The ambitious target came after Mr. Trump announced, and then rolled back a portion of, steep tariffs that in some cases meant import taxes cost more than the wholesale price of a good itself.
The 90-day goal, however, is a tenth of the time it usually takes to reach a trade deal, according to a New York Times analysis of major agreements with the United States currently in effect, raising questions about how realistic the administration’s target may be. It typically takes 917 days, or roughly two and a half years, for a trade deal to go from initial talks to the president’s desk for signature, the analysis shows.
Roughly 60 days into the current process, Mr. Trump has so far announced only one deal: a pact with Britain, which is not one of America’s biggest trading partners.
He has also suggested that negotiations with China have been rocky….
White House officials have significantly pared back their ambitions for the deals.
In April, Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, hedged the number of agreements they might reach, suggesting that the United States would talk to somewhere between 50 and 70 countries. Last month he said the United States was negotiating with 17 “very important trading relationships,” not including China.
“I think when the administration first started, they thought they could actually do these binding and enforceable deals within 90 days and then quickly realized that they bit off more than they could chew,” Ms. Cutler said.
And then there is this from NBC News’ Shannon Pettypiece and Rob Wile:
President Donald Trump’s ambitious plan to broker dozens of trade deals with some of the United States’ closest trading partners has begun to show cracks as the clock on his 90-day pause for most country-specific tariffs winds down to just over one month….
“It’s going to be a long, drawn-out negotiation,” said Warren Maruyama, who worked on trade deals during the George W. Bush administration as general counsel for the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. “You could hope that your trading partner is stupid and will agree to a bad deal. But, for the most part, most foreign trade negotiators are quite good, and it’s typically a pretty brutal head-to-head negotiation between two sophisticated countries who have been doing trade deals for decades.”
The increased tensions Trump has injected in recent weeks could also be adding to the complexities U.S. officials face when they sit across from their foreign counterparts, who may feel they don’t have a clear understanding of what the United States is offering, where its red lines are or what it is trying to achieve from a trade agreement.
“I think it’s going to be a challenge for a number of our trading partners, who feel like they are negotiating with a gun to their heads and negotiating with an administration that is not reliable,” said Alex Jacquez, who worked for the National Economic Council during the Biden administration.
So, in other words, since the Trump administration’s deadline for best trade offers has passed, the only news stories are about just how gosh-darn difficult it is to negotiate a trade deal.
Maybe the Trump administration will surprise its doubters and hammer out an array of bilateral trade deals in the remaining month before the 90-day pause expires — but I doubt it. Maybe Scott Bessent and Howard Lutnick will pull multiple rabbits out of a hat and rewrite the global trading system in a manner favorable to U.S. economic interests — but I doubt it.
For the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World, the most the curious incident of the past week was a deadline come and gone for best trade offers, and the radio silence by the Trump White House about trade since that deadline has passed.
From The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers chair Steven Miran did go on Fox News today to assert that, “there's a number of deals in the works with a number of our trading partners, particularly in Asia, and Europe as well.” When asked to provide any specifics, however, he demurred.
I admire the diligence of the hard working staff at Drezner World's pursuit of elusive news of trade deals being progressed with the Trump administation. Such diligence for so little reward. I'm inclined to think that the buttocks of the Great Man have been curiously unkissed by desperate leaders of other countries seeking deals. My guess he misstook them from the many of his hard working flunkies.
Here's the art of the deal: partners are talking (talk is cheap!) but nothing is going to happen for a while because they are waiting for Trump to become desperate, and they will extract maximum concessions from the US.
Trump may be able to fool his followers into believing he's a good negotiator, but in real life he's being eaten alive.