How Hard It Is to Make Trade Deals

President Trump has announced wave after wave of tariffs since taking office in January, part of a sweeping effort that he has argued would secure better trade terms with other countries. “It’s called negotiation,” he recently said.

In April, administration officials vowed to sign trade deals with as many as 90 countries in 90 days. The ambitious target came after Mr. Trump announced, and then rolled back a portion of, steep tariffs that in some cases meant import taxes cost more than the wholesale price of a good itself.

The 90-day goal, however, is a tenth of the time it usually takes to reach a trade deal, according to a New York Times analysis of major agreements with the United States currently in effect, raising questions about how realistic the administration’s target may be. It typically takes 917 days, or roughly two and a half years, for a trade deal to go from initial talks to the president’s desk for signature, the analysis shows.

Roughly 60 days into the current process, Mr. Trump has so far announced only one deal: a pact with Britain, which is not one of America’s biggest trading partners.

He has also suggested that negotiations with China have been rocky. “I like President XI of China, always have, and always will, but he is VERY TOUGH, AND EXTREMELY HARD TO MAKE A DEAL WITH!!!” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social on Wednesday. China and the United States agreed last month to temporarily slash tariffs on each other’s imports in a gesture of good will to continue talks.

Part of what the president can accomplish boils down to what you can call a deal.

The pact with Britain is less of a deal than it is a framework for talking about a deal, said Wendy Cutler, the vice president of the Asia Society Policy Institute and a former U.S. trade negotiator. What was officially released by the two nations more closely resembled talking points for “what you were going to negotiate versus the actual commitment,” she said.

During his first term, Mr. Trump secured two major trade agreements, both signed in January 2020. One was the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which was a reworking of the North American free trade treaty from the 1990s that had helped transform the economies of the three nations.

U.S.M.C.A. is an all-encompassing, legally binding agreement that resulted from a lengthy and formal process, according to trade analysts.

Such deals are supposed to cover all aspects of trade between the respective nations and are negotiated under specific guidelines for congressional consultation. Closing the deal involves both negotiation and ratification — modifying or making laws in each partner country. The deals are signed by trade negotiators before the president signs the legislation that puts it into effect for the United States.

Mr. Trump’s other major agreement in his first term was with China, in an echo of the current trade war. The pact, unlike previous deals, came about after Mr. Trump threatened tariffs on certain Chinese imports. This “tariff first, talk later” approach, said Inu Manak, a trade policy fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is part of the same playbook the administration is currently using.

The result was a nonbinding agreement between the two countries, known as “Phase One,” that did not require approval from Congress and that could be ended by either party at any time. Still, it took almost one year and nine months to complete. China ultimately fell far short of the commitments it made to purchase American goods under the agreement.

A comparison of the two first-term Trump deals shows the drawn-out and sometimes winding paths each took to completion. Fragile truces (including ones made for 90 days) were formed, only for talks to break down later, all while rounds of tariffs injected uncertainty into the diplomatic relations between countries.

The Times analysis used the date from the start of negotiations to the date when the president signed to determine the length of deal making for each major agreement dating back to 1985 that’s currently in effect. The median time it took to get to the president’s signature was just over 900 days. (A separate analysis published in 2016 by the Peterson Institute for International Economics used the date of signature by country representatives as the completion moment and found that the median deal took more than 570 days.)

With roughly one month before the administration’s self-imposed deadline, Mr. Trump’s ability to forge deals has been thrust into sudden doubt. Last week, a U.S. trade court ruled he had overstepped his authority in imposing the April tariffs.

For now, the tariffs remain in place, following a temporary stay from a federal appeals court. But in arguing its case, the federal government initially said that the ruling could upset negotiations with other nations and undercut the president’s leverage.

In a statement on Wednesday, Kush Desai, a White House spokesman, said that trade negotiators were working to secure “custom-made trade deals at lightning speed that level the playing field for American industries and workers.”

But in other recent public statements, White House officials have significantly pared back their ambitions for the deals.

In April, Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, hedged the number of agreements they might reach, suggesting that the United States would talk to somewhere between 50 and 70 countries. Last month he said the United States was negotiating with 17 “very important trading relationships,” not including China.

“I think when the administration first started, they thought they could actually do these binding and enforceable deals within 90 days and then quickly realized that they bit off more than they could chew,” Ms. Cutler said.

The administration told its negotiating partners to submit offers of trade concessions they were willing to make by Wednesday, in an effort to strike trade deals in the coming weeks. The deadline was earlier reported by Reuters.

The current approach to deal making may be strategic, Ms. Manak said. One of the benefits of not doing a comprehensive deal like U.S.M.C.A. is that the administration can declare small “victories” on a much faster timeline, she said.

“It means that trade agreements simply are just not what they used to be,” she added. “And you can’t really guarantee that whatever the U.S. promises is actually going to be upheld in the long run.”