Continuity and Change in US Trade Policy Towards China and Beyond

The paper analyses developments before May 2021 when presented to a teleconference held in Le Havre, France.It considers that particular rhetoric of change hides a bipartisan continuity in international trade policies of the U.S.toward China, and Eurasia. Accordingly, it tried to determine whether the disruptive trade actions of the Trump administration concerning Eurasia and China would be pursued by the Biden admin­istration.Trump administration followed in a crescendo the antidumping and countervailing duties favoured in the last years by President Obama. The Trump administration also took a bolder stance by using other US legal mechanisms (out of WTO but not forbidden by WTO) to adopt trade sanctions against China and other countries.However, according to expert commenters, a Hillary Presidency would have also used such legal mechanisms, albeit under different rhetoric. There is also a continuity in the escalation of US actions inside the WTO from Obama to Trump, who finally blocked the Appellate Body dispute settle­ment.Given these deep continuities, the author considers that the trade war with tariffs and sanctions on China adopted by the Trump administration will remain in place for the time being under the Biden administration