The dominant academic literature about trade agreements maintains that they are only about national terms-of-trade manipulation and not at all about purely political concerns. Non-academic economists, commentators, and diplomats by contrast think that trade agreements are all about political...

Escape mechanisms from trade agreements are necessary because such agreements are incomplete, self-enforcing, contracts negotiated when the future is unknown. The essence of multilateral escape mechanisms is the principle of equivalent withdrawal of concessions, which allows trade agreements to...