In his first term, President Obama paid lip service to the value of diplomacy but did little negotiating. Now he’s stepped up the pace, with the Iranian nuclear deal and a trade pact with the EU in the offing. He’d have done better to have done less.
Like unhappy families, bad agreements are each bad in their own way. And of course there are degrees of badness: no trade deal, no matter how implausibly dreadful, could be worse than a nuclear deal gone wrong. But bad agreements do have a few features in common.
The major postwar agreements—from the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade to the North Atlantic Treaty that created NATO—stood the test of time because they were good deals that met real needs. They were serious, clear, and substantial, and they benefited everyone.
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