With little more than 70 days left before higher tariffs return for 75 trading partners, President Donald Trump and his administration are under pressure to finalize trade deals before time runs out.
International trade experts told Business Insider it would be difficult to achieve many meaningful and comprehensive trade deals over such a short period of time, especially when the 10% blanket tariffs currently violate many previously signed agreements.
‘There’s no way,” Willy C. Shih, a professor of management practice in business administration at Harvard Business School, told BI when asked if he thinks there could be trade deals with 75 countries before the 90-day pause on tariffs announced on April 9 comes to an end.
“The problem is that trade between every country, every trading partner of the US has a different profile, and you have different relative strengths and weaknesses,” Shih added, “The challenge is, do these broad brush tariffs recognize detail-level interdependencies, and how long would it take to sort out? It’s going to take time to understand what some of those unexpected impacts might be.”
Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics at the Cato Institute, a libertarian-leaning think tank, told BI that even the fastest US trade agreement in the past took about six months to negotiate and even longer to implement.
“We’re starting to see the administration acknowledge that reality because they’re talking less about finished deals and more about term sheet agreements in principle and the issues that they are going to discuss,” said Lincicome. “But that’s the first inning of a very long ball game. There’s a lot more to do, and it certainly doesn’t mean that they’re actually going to finish it.”
The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that the US Trade Representative’s office is laying out a “framework” for trade negotiations.
“USTR is working under an organized and rigorous framework and moving ahead quickly with willing trading partners,” said a USTR spokeswoman. “President Trump and USTR have made US objectives clear, and our trading partners have a very good sense of what they can each individually offer.”
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No substantial trade deals have been signed so far
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said during an interview with Fox News host Lara Trump on April 12 that Trump is “totally in the driver’s seat” when it came to tariff negotiations, and that meetings with more than 75 countries trying to cut a deal were “back to back.”
Likewise, Peter Navarro, a counselor to the president on trade, said in an interview on NBC News’s “Meet the Press” on April 13 that trade deals are “unfolding exactly like we thought it would in a dominant scenario,” when asked how consumers and businesses can make decisions under rapidly changing tariff policies.
“We’ve got 90 deals in 90 days possibly pending here,” Navarro added.
However, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said at an off-the-record and invitation-only event sponsored by JPMorgan Chase & Co. earlier this week that a trade deal with China “could take two to three years.”
There are conflicting narratives about whether the US and China are in trade talks. Trump has said talks are taking place, while China has denied that the countries are discussing tariffs.
And despite Trump saying that “big progress” has been made in talks with Japan, no deal has been signed as of April 25. Japan’s trade negotiator, Ryosei Akazawa, departed Washington, DC, on April 18.
Thai Finance Minister Pichai Chunhavajira’s meeting with the Trump administration, scheduled for April 23, has also been postponed.
The White House and the Department of the Treasury did not respond to requests for comment.
Lincicome said that a meaningful trade deal covers many topics, including labor, environmental regulations, procedural mechanisms, and dispute resolution — all of which amount to a document with 20-plus chapters.
Plus, Linicome said, trade agreements are typically negotiated in consultation with domestic businesses, unions, and legislators, so negotiators working on various offers and counteroffers would need to bring all possible deals back to their home countries to be discussed.
“The market blowback has actually flipped the script on the president,” said Lincicome. “Now the president has put pressure on himself, and that really motivates him to make deals, which of course, foreign governments know this, and that means that they can not offer their best offers — they can slow down the process.”
“My guess is that the tariffs are not going to be devastating for most Americans,” Lincicome added. “But will it be extremely annoying, and will they not like it, and will they penalize the president for it? Yes.”
Philip Luck, director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies economics program told BI that the Trump administration might sign vague “agreements” that are lacking in substance to make it seem like there is a deal — but even that would require concessions from other countries that may be feeling less incentivized to be cooperative when the US has imposed blanket tariffs that arguably violate past trade deals.
The US has free trade agreements with South Korea, Australia, and Singapore, among many others. The US is also part of a trilateral trade agreement involving Canada and Mexico.
“We’ve really kind of shot ourselves in the foot here,” said Luck. “There is a reason why trade deals typically don’t start with tariffs and trade wars.”
