Less than three months after Congress granted President George W. Bush authority to negotiate new trade agreements, the line-up of countries eager for deals with the US has stretched to record length.
Talks with Chile and Singapore are set to conclude by the end of the year. The US will begin negotiations shortly with Morocco, five Central American countries and the five members of the Southern African Customs Union.
But the list hardly stops there. Australia is pushing for a free-trade pact with the US. At last weekend's Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (Apec) summit, the US said it was ready to pursue deals in south-east Asia, putting Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines at the top of the list. In addition, Robert Zoellick, the US trade representative, said this week that half a dozen other Latin American countries had also approached the US. "There's no shortage of customers out there," says Mr Zoellick. "We would like to move forward with negotiations and we'll move forward one way or another."
Jeffrey Schott, senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics, says: "I don't think we've ever had as broad-ranging proposals as we now have for bilateral, regional and multilateral negotiations all proceeding simultaneously."
The surge in bilateral trade talks marks a significant shift in the US approach to trade liberalisation. Before the 1980s the US confined itself to multilateral trade agreements. In 1985 it concluded a bilateral deal with Israel, largely for strategic and political reasons, and then in 1989 signed an agreement with Canada, its largest trading partner. Since then the US has added only two others - Mexico as part of the regional North American Free Trade Agreement, and Jordan.
Trade economists have long criticised bilateral agreements, warning that they could create a patchwork of global rules that would distort trade flows. In addition, most of the deals would be unlikely to bring substantial economic benefits to the US. Of the countries now under consideration, the biggest US export market is Singapore, and that is only the 11th largest.
But Mr Zoellick says that such deals are a critical part of a larger strategy that is aimed at pushing for an ambitious new Doha Round global trade agreement and a regional Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) by 2005. The idea comes out of the formation of Apec in 1989, which he believes threatened to isolate the European Union economically and led the EU to make the final deals that brought home the Uruguay Round world trade agreement.
But the strategy may be riskier this time around. Brazil, which is the biggest market for the US in South America, this week fired back at Mr Zoellick's threat to pursue more bilateral deals. Celso Lafer, its foreign minister, told Reuters on the eve of today's meeting of western hemisphere trade ministers in Ecuador that the US approach "would result in a splintering of the [FTAA] negotiating process".
Dan Tarullo, a former White House economic adviser, says that while the Apec gambit was tremendously effective, a series of bilateral deals with smaller countries is unlikely to exert the same pressure. Apec held out the threat of the US forming a wealthy Asian trading bloc that excluded Europe. In contrast, he says, "I don't think it's particularly credible to believe that other parts of the world are going to get worried because we do a bilateral with Costa Rica."
Mr Zoellick is also facing domestic political pressures that could make it hard to use smaller bilateral deals as a springboard for concluding ambitious regional and global pacts.
In order to win support from a divided Congress for new trade negotiating authority, the Bush administration agreed that future trade deals would include measures that require countries to adhere to their own environmental and labour laws, or risk the possibility of economic sanctions.
The US can probably force such provisions on its partners but officials conceded that such a proposal was unlikely to be acceptable either in the Doha Round or the FTAA talks.
Most of the proposed bilateral pacts would require little in the way of US concessions. But there is much less congressional support for bigger deals that could require the US to cut subsidies for farmers, open up import-sensitive sectors such as textiles, or agree to weaken its laws against unfairly traded imports.
Mr Zoellick is confident, however, that he can prevail here as well by bringing home a series of bilateral deals that promise tangible benefits to US exporters and help rekindle congressional enthusiasm for larger agreements to come.
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