Trump as a Change Agent in International Law : Ends, Means, and Legacies

Former US President Donald Trump represents the most significant “change agent” in international law in recent decades, withdrawing from and attacking a variety of international agreements. In this paper, I analyze Trump as a change agent, analyzing the nature of his policies and the legacies of those policies into the Biden administration. With respect to the former, I hypothesize that Trump represents a “hostile” change agent, seeking to change not the rules of law, but rather the rule of law, replacing multilateral institutions with power-based bargaining. With respect to legacies, I hypothesize that, notwithstanding the path-dependent nature of existing international institutions, Trump’s attacks effected important changes and themselves became path-dependent, reversible only at a cost to his successor. To test these hypotheses, I undertake a comparative case study analyzing the impacts of Trump’s policies in four areas of international trade law: (a) renegotiation of NAFTA; (b) withdrawal from the Trans Pacific Partnership; (c) noncompliance with WTO rules; and (d) paralysis of the WTO Appellate Body. I show that Trump’s actions undermined existing legal agreements while generating substantial costs of reversal for the Biden administration, which failed to fully overturn Trump’s policies during its first year in office