Is the US exploiting its military strength in trade negotiations?

The US knows how it likes its trade negotiations. It's a simple rubric: the US puts its proposal on the table, and its interlocutors accept.

In the Doha round of the WTO talks, as we know, this hasn't worked very well. So the US is signing bilateral preferential trade agreements instead, the latest of which is with South Korea. In turn, these bilateral agreements only serve to weaken the case for global trade agreements. Jagdish Bhagwati says that "the whole world has practically collapsed into bilateralism which is driven by sloppy arguments and failure of leadership by the major powers such as the United States." And Martin Wolf hates these bilateral agreements as well. So why do they happen? Robert Wade has an interesting take on Wolf's blog:

Singapore's prime concern was less with the economics of the agreement than with the military-security impact: the government calculated that the agreement would help to tie the US into the region militarily. Presumably the South Korean government has been making a similar calculation, being only too aware of growing sentiment in the US to "bring our troops home", including from East Asia, at the same time as North Korea could explode on its doorstep and China-Taiwan could explode to the south.

In other words, this isn't a trade agreement at all: it's a trade-for-security agreement. One could even, if one was feeling uncharitable, characterize it as the US extorting trade concessions from the East Asians in return for keeping a military presence in the region.

(Via Mark Thoma)