Commercial Diplomacy Key to Trump Trade Agenda
Richard Pearson
July 1, 2025
White House needs to prioritize commercial diplomacy for U.S. ambassadors globally.
Specialized agencies are resources for success and effective competition with China.
Recent Trump Administration orders directing American ambassadors serving in African nations to make commercial diplomacy a core focus of bilateral engagement went so far as to state that ambassadors’ performance will be evaluated on how effectively they advocate for American businesses and the number of deals that result.
That directive represents a long overdue prioritization of commercial diplomacy by the White House. Such efforts, however, must not be limited to Africa. Similar expectations should be articulated to all serving American ambassadors globally.
Indications are that the administration is moving in that direction as its nominees take up their posts. During his Senate confirmation hearing in May, Michael DeSombre, the nominee for assistant secretary of state for East Asia, characterized the prioritization of “U.S. prosperity through robust commercial diplomacy and reciprocal trade relations with all countries in the Indo-Pacific” as one of his top three priorities.
Fortunately, the President and his nominees, including the American ambassadors who serve at his pleasure, have a plethora of agencies to work with. These include the Foreign Commercial Service of the Department of Commerce, the Export-Import Bank of the United States (EXIM Bank), the Trade and Development Agency, and the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC). The administration’s challenge will be seeing that these numerous agencies and their programs are equipped for success, fully utilized, available to exporters, and responsive to the needs of American businesses and their foreign customers.
These specialized trade agencies are key to a Trump trade agenda that seeks to leverage tariffs and trade policies to increase domestic employment and rebuild U.S. manufacturing. Doing so successfully, however, will require a generational rethink of how America’s foreign affairs agencies manage essential export promotion functions.
The State Department is overburdened with mission creep and congressionally mandated reporting that few read. Beset with excessive and ever-growing numbers of bureaus, special envoys and coordinators, and a lumbering bureaucracy, the State Department is poorly equipped to lead effective commercial diplomacy.
America’s trade agencies, by contrast, have remained lean and mission-focused administration after administration—to a degree remarkable for federal agencies that operate in a system that too often favors administrative girth over effectiveness and results.
Being small and highly specialized, these agencies were largely untouched by the DEIA and other non-mission-critical initiatives of the Biden Administration that were so heavily imposed upon the State Department to the detriment of employee morale and agency effectiveness.
Focused on promoting American exports and investment to increase jobs at home, these agencies’ workforces are admirably apolitical. Working at both EXIM and the Foreign Commercial Service under Democratic and Republican administrations, I saw highly capable teams of civil servants who put their politics at the door each morning and focused on working with the administration in power to increase exports overseas and jobs at home.
In a budget environment of shrinking resources, agencies are expected to do more with less. The two leading export promotion agencies—the Foreign Commercial Service and EXIM Bank—have long track records of delivering value and being able to demonstrate that to Congress with clear and quantitative metrics. EXIM—charging fees and interest on its loans and export credit insurance—has most years returned money to the Treasury. FCS operates with an officer head count of roughly 225—or approximately 1.5 percent of the total number of American Foreign Service Officers globally.
To a great extent, the President laid the necessary groundwork for success during his first term.
President Trump reengineered the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) as the DFC, marshalling the resources of the private sector to promote energy, healthcare, critical infrastructure, and other projects in the developing world. The China and Transformational Exports Program (CTEP) of the EXIM Bank, which was established in 2019 in response to a congressional mandate, provides an effective and actionable mechanism to aid U.S. exporters facing Chinese state-subsidized competition across a range of sectors. That both initiatives were continued more or less unchanged by the Biden Administration testifies to their practicality.
The second Trump Administration would be wise to continue in that vein and look to the other export promotion agencies to spearhead key commercial initiatives.
The administration should refocus commercial diplomacy and export promotion to the Department of Commerce and away from a State Department that has worked to expand its mission into that space, resulting in needless overlap, sclerosis, and confusion for American exporters and their foreign customers.
While it remains to be seen how much of the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) efforts to shrink agency workforces will survive Elon Musk’s exit from government, the early-2025 reduction of the Department of Commerce’s domestic footprint resulted in the freeing up of funds that should go to commercial diplomacy efforts overseas—especially in the most challenging markets, where the U.S. is often well behind China’s aggressive and well-resourced commercial outreach.
A rethinking of officer positions abroad is also in order, as the Commerce Department lacks adequate presence in many key locations where China’s agencies and companies are active, such as in Southeast Asia and Africa. The Trump Administration would be wise to establish full-time commercial offices staffed with American officers at U.S. embassies and consulates in Surabaya and Medan in Indonesia, Colombo in Sri Lanka, and the African economic centers of Kinshasa, Dakar, and Yaoundé, among other locations.
Waiting for foreign buyers to seek out American products may have worked in the immediate post-World War Two years, when other major economies were offline. Such an approach is not viable today, however, when every major economy has active export development efforts, including export credit agencies in key markets.
Unfortunately, the American approach to export promotion remains overly passive and reactive. EXIM, for example, remains in a mindset of waiting for deals to show up in its Art Deco lobby in Washington. EXIM needs to be part of the conversation much earlier in the deal cycle, as Chinese, Korean, and other export credit agencies are through their representative offices in cities around the world. Augmenting one or more U.S. embassies on each continent with a forward-deployed export finance presence, as EXIM’s Canadian counterpart Export Development Canada (EDC) did just last month in Bangkok, would better enable U.S. exporters to compete internationally by making the substantial financial capabilities of the public and private sectors more available and accessible throughout the deal cycle.
President Trump’s long-standing aversion to military adventurism and his career as a businessman bode well for a reprioritization of U.S. foreign policy toward commerce. American exporters and workers would surely welcome a continued turn in that direction and the burying forever of the neocon interventionism of the George W. Bush administration and the feckless activist foreign policy of Obama and Biden. The Trump Administration would be wise to refocus on the Department of Commerce and sister trade agencies as lead implementers of such efforts.
In the second half of 2025, the Trump Administration’s trade initiatives will inevitably move from the heat and light of tariffs to the more prosaic task of building a viable trade promotion infrastructure that prioritizes the American worker and furthers an America-first and national-interest-based diplomacy. It should not be lost on anyone in the Administration that the manufacturing heartland so heavily impacted by foreign manufacturing and outsourcing also voted overwhelmingly for the President in November.
The President and his team will find that, as far as commercial diplomacy and trade promotion are concerned, they are starting from the foundation laid in his first term—but that much work remains to be done to maximize the benefits.
Richard Pearson formerly served at the Export-Import Bank and the Department of Commerce—most recently as a Foreign Commercial Officer at the U.S. Consulate General in Shanghai, until 2025.
