Trump’s bilateral trade deals are undermining the global trading system

Overall, the three early 2020 agreements have started to transform the multilateral rule-based system into a largely bilaterally managed, outcome-based system. RTAs and their new practices accelerate the fragmentation of the world trading system into numerous trading zones with different overlapping memberships and trade coverage, tariffs, quotas, and quantitative trade targets, plus other rules such as local content and country of origin requirements as well as dispute settlement processes.