WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - National Security Matters: Trump's Trade Tactics

Episode Date: November 16, 2025

During President Donald Trump's diplomatic trip to Asia, he touted his many trade deals and frameworks with multiple Asian countries. Why the distinction and what did we get out of the deals? Malia Thibado discusses definitions, decisionmaking, and duties on this week's National Security Matters.

Hello and welcome to National Security Matters, the show where we discuss anything and everything related to U.S. international relations and defense policy. I'm your host, Malia Tibido. President Trump continues his diplomatic trip to Asia, where so far he's brokered new trade deals with Malaysia, Cambodia, and Thailand. And he anticipates finalizing the end to the U.S.'s year-long trade war with China. during his meeting with President Xi Jinping this Thursday. In that light, let's talk trade deals, how and why we make them, who we make them with, and how we enforce them. To make a deal, we need a mutual incentive to negotiate between two countries, a relationship where they understand they can derive mutual benefit by working together. These incentives can range from, one, aggressive military power resulting in economically lopsided deals.

For example, when China lost the first opium war to Britain in 1842, aside from the straight-up land concessions of Hong Kong and then the annual money tribute it paid, the Asian country was also forced to open up treaty boards to British merchants, giving the British more access to Chinese goods without economic reciprocity. A second incentive is non-monetary. Often, these include military alliances, standardization or reduction of regulations, investments, and access to rare earth minerals. Think the recent framework agreement between the U.S. and Australia. It covers wide provisions for expanding critical slash rare earth minerals,

trade through one, streamlining permit acceptance processes, two, protecting domestic producers, and three, solidifying the supply chain between these two countries. A third incentive for negotiations is a reduction of tariffs. Now, after Trump's April 2nd Liberation Day declaration of reciprocal tariffs on many countries were all familiar with the definition, a tax imposed on imported goods, making them more expensive. I'll point out for this specific case of Trump tariffs, there was, and still is, wild contention

over whether they were actually an incentivization strategy for trade or whether they were a genuine push for protectionism, that being the strategy of protecting a country's domestic industries by imposing tariffs. Regardless, the tariffs have yielded mixed results, Far from his 90 deals and 90 days promise, Trump has secured 11 concrete trade agreements and the rest are what we call trade frameworks. Now, what's the difference between a framework and a signed trade deal and how are they enforced? A trade framework is a non-binding preliminary negotiation.

It works out the broad provisions and benefits of the contract, but it is not codified into U.S. law. Some argue it's a short-term action and easily reversible slash unlikely to survive past a change of administration. An official trade agreement is a legally binding contract between countries codified within U.S. law that dictates specific terms of trade and gives obligations slash the means to enforce rules. It's unknown where the U.S. is viewing these frameworks as internationally binding. as is custom with World Trade Organization member states or if it's operating on a unilateral assumption. But given the outcomes are the same, the U.S. abides by the frameworks it sets out, regardless of whether it's binding or not. I'm not sure it practically matters at this point, though technically Trump will need to codify these into concrete agreements before he leaves office if he wants them to be respected. past his administration.

His Trump administration does still have three more years to work towards solidifying agreements and based on its past negotiations with European Union and other semi-bulletrant allies, I'm kind of looking forward to it. Thank you for listening. This has been Lea Tibido with National Security Matters on WRFH Radio for Hillsdale 101.7 FM. Thank you.