In his second term, U.S. President Donald Trump has flipped the script on trade policy, slapping tariffs on allies and adversaries alike to punish perceived unfairness and to extract an array of concessions. He declared that the guiding logic of this new approach is reciprocity. On social media, he explained that “whatever Countries charge the United States of America, we will charge them—No more, no less!” U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer has called the United States’ new bilateral deals “agreements for reciprocal trade,” or ARTs, a reference to his boss’s most famous book on negotiation.

But the Trump administration’s approach is not reciprocity at all. It is coercive unilateralism dressed up as reciprocity. The United States has pursued reciprocal trade for the past 90 years, but what Trump is doing breaks from this tradition. Under the threat of tariffs and, in some cases, territorial expansion, the administration has pressured U.S. trading partners to accept unbalanced trade concessions. Washington’s goals are to rebalance trade by tilting the playing field in favor of U.S. firms and producers, to force partners to pay for what Trump perceives as past unfairness, and to realign trade policy with foreign policy goals that preserve U.S. hegemony. Other countries are expected to give a lot but get little in return.

The United States, however, cannot remake the entire international trading system on its own. Any structural change to the international order requires others to buy in to the vision that is being sold. U.S. trading partners may be willing to try to appease Trump in the short term, but they do have other trading options—and they are already starting to pursue alternatives to the United States. Trump will need to offer them a few carrots along with using sticks if he wants these trade arrangements to last. Otherwise, the trust and order that the United States built through decades of careful trade compromises will quickly run out. An “America first” trade policy will leave America behind.

UNFAIR AND UNBALANCED

The idea that reciprocity ought to order global commerce is not new. Since the 1930s, U.S. trade policy has been based on the idea that agreements should be in the interests of both parties.The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the founding charter of the modern trading system signed in 1947, called on countries to enter into “reciprocal and mutually advantageous arrangements.” Although determining reciprocity is always somewhat subjective because of the nature of concessions that countries must make on different products and services, the deals that the United States entered into over the past 90 years followed a meaningfully reciprocal logic. Canada, Mexico, and the United States each lowered tariffs nearly to zero in the North American Free Trade Agreement, for example, and South Korea and the United States agreed across several rounds of negotiations starting in 2006 to eliminate tariffs except for sensitive products such as U.S. light trucks and South Korean rice and beef. The United States viewed reciprocity as a balancing of offers and requests—an act of give and get—and structured its trade agenda around this principle.

The Trump administration claims to be restoring reciprocity. But the administration’s notion of reciprocity rests heavily on the “get” and less on the “give.” It is more like a reparations program. Trump believes that the United States has already made too many historical concessions, claiming that the United States has been “ripped off” by Europe, Japan, South Korea, and many other close U.S. allies for years because it has been buying their goods while also footing much of the bill for their........

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