Does the Trump Administration Feel Constrained by U.S. Trade Agreements?

In two separate instances yesterday, I came across questions about whether the Trump administration feels constrained by the USMCA and other trade agreements. I'll start with the second instance.

During an interview with the CBC in the afternoon, host Rosemary Barton asked U.S. Trade Rep. Jamieson Greer the following question:

It's a better deal ... than yesterday, but it's not a better deal than when CUSMA itself was being respected by the United States, which is not the case now, Ambassador, as you know. And one of the things that Prime Minister [Carney] also raised was this issue of reliability. He points to the fact that other countries have made deals with your country. He said it looked like they were signed on pencil because they've changed overnight. So why would Canada sign a deal without even any guarantees that you would continue to respect the deal, given that you haven't respected CUSMA?

Greer started his reply by focusing on the Trump administration's recent bilateral deals:

So which deal is that that we haven't respected that we've signed over the past year? Like, I'm just not familiar with that. I mean, we have made a dozen deals ...

Barton jumped in to make it clear she had the USMCA in mind:

You've added tariffs. I'm talking about Canada. You've added tariffs, right, above and beyond the free trade agreement, and that sort of contradicts what a free trade agreement is, of course.

In response, Greer talked about the USMCA review, and then emphasized the agreement's security exception as the reason for any new tariffs that would otherwise violate the deal:

... USMCA includes specific exclusions for national security measures, and so steel, aluminum, autos – these are all national security measures for us that fall within the exclusions within USMCA. ...

This exchange jumped out at me (the whole interview is worth a watch), because earlier in the day I had been doing a webinar on the USMCA where I was asked a very similar question. Karthik Sankaran of the Quincy Institute asked me the following:

[Juan Carlos Baker Pineda] already mentioned you have all these different tariffs ... floating around. And you have this process where some things are exempt, but clearly other things are a violation of U.S. commitments under USMCA, and one of the lines in Mark Carney's kind of ... walkout mic drop, so to speak, was these agreements were signed with a pencil. What does that tell you about U.S. intentions? ...

My response was:

My sense of the Trump administration is it sees all of these statutes that Juan Carlos referred to – 301, 232, 338 – ... as taking priority over the USMCA and any other international trade obligations. So they will observe those agreements unless they decide not to and decide to impose tariffs under one of those statutes for whatever reason. And when they do decide to impose tariffs, they will often have a justification under the agreement. So they'll say, "Well, this is for national security. We're invoking the national security exception," which they've done many times now. ... So ... , in their view, or their stated view, [they] are technically complying with the agreement.

Or in the case of these Section 301 tariffs that are being imposed in response to concerns about forced labor, maybe they would say, "Well, here, these are justified under the public morals exception."

So, regardless of what their explanation is, and they will generally have one if pressed, they don't feel too constrained by these agreements. So, I think that's the written in pencil part right there.

So, maybe what we're seeing here is sort of the famous saying of "we're observing it in the breach." ...

Am I right about that? Given the scope of the Section 232 tariffs in Trump's second term, it certainly feels that way. So many products are being covered at this point that the connection to national security, which was weak to begin with, seems totally severed. And if that's the case, how reliable are any of these agreements? I feel like Greer's point at the outset may have been that, putting aside the older trade agreements, the Trump administration will comply with the tariff commitments in the new bilateral agreements it has signed during the second term. But how can trading partners rely on that? What is special about these agreements that distinguishes them from, say, the USMCA or the revised KORUS FTA, which were negotiated by Trump during his first term? What is stopping the Trump administration from imposing tariffs for security reasons in ways that conflict with the tariff commitments made in the recent bilateral agreements? These are questions that U.S. trading partners are probably wondering about, and I'm not sure what the answers are.