Donald Trump’s flawed plan to strong-arm other countries into “one-on-one” trade deals.

In late January, President Trump stated that he would be pushing for new “one-on-one” trade deals with specific countries to replace multilateral agreements; exploiting US economic clout to negotiate deals which benefit the US the most. Markus Gastinger has created an index of trade and economic power in order to determine which countries Trump might try to target. He finds that countries and blocs with which the US has a large trade deficit, such as China and the European Union are too powerful to make good targets. On the other hand, less powerful countries, such as Vietnam and Japan could simply refuse to negotiate. Either way, Trump’s trade policy may well end up being a continuation of the status quo.