This book examines bilateral U.S. trade diplomacy during the 1980s and early 1990s. Ka Zeng advances (and generally sustains) an important thesis: that in trade disputes, U.S. policy has been tougher and more effective toward advanced industrial democracies (Europe, Japan) than nondemocratic nations (esp. China). The reason, she argues, lies in the structure of the economic relationships. Trade between the United States and the democracies is largely “competitive,” with industries and sectors going head-to-head for markets. The trade pattern with autocracies (and less-advanced economies like India and Brazil) is more “complementary,” with imports from these countries largely in product areas U.S. producers have abandoned.

To test this thesis, Zeng examines market access cases brought under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, as amended. Drawing substantially on ratings provided by Thomas O. Bayard and Kimberly Ann Elliott (Reciprocity and Retaliation in U.S. Trade Policy, 1994), she finds that among nine major trading partners, U.S. negotiators had the greatest success with Japan and the least success with India. Overall, responsiveness to U.S. pressure was greater in the nations that have the more competitive trade structures—Canada, the European Union, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, in descending order of competitiveness.

This linkage of trade conflict with trade structure is an important finding, backed by a domestic political explanation. In cases where a trade relationship is competitive, U.S. domestic interests will reinforce one another: In the Japanese semiconductor case, for example, companies threatened by Japanese competition at home backed the threat of sanctions aimed at securing greater access to Tokyo's market. If trade relations are mainly complementary, as with China, Americans benefiting from imports will be a more important relative force and will oppose actual implementation of sanctions, thus undercutting U.S. negotiators.

Zeng supplements her statistical analysis with a “structured, focused comparison” (per Alexander George) of U.S. trade bargaining with Japan and China. On the former, she examines the bitter semiconductor conflict of the mid-1980s (involving U.S. sanctions) and three so-called Super-301 cases initiated by the George H. W. Bush administration. In all four, she finds that U.S. negotiators achieved much of what they sought. She applies her framework effectively and tells the conflict stories credibly—though without the deep understanding of U.S. politics exhibited by John Kunkel in America's Trade Policy Towards Japan (2003).

But staying within the boundaries of the cases has costs. The reader will not learn here that United States Trade Representative Carla Hills's implementation of the “Super 301” law in 1989–90 was much softer than the language Congress enacted in 1988 seemed to demand. She named Japan as a “priority foreign country,” not for the “number and pervasiveness” of its “acts, policies, and practices” that impeded U.S. exports (Section 1302, Public Law 100-418), but for restrictive practices in just three product areas. Nor will the reader learn that the economic importance of Dynamic Random Access Memory (commodity) semiconductors was wildly exaggerated by both countries in the 1980s; in fact, their cheapness, wherever produced, fueled the U.S. ability, in the nineties, to exploit its competitive strengths in more sophisticated products and systems, and enhance productivity economy-wide.

The China chapters, by contrast, show sophistication in recognizing the broader context (geostrategic, in particular), together with the fact that a primary U.S. “threat”—withdrawing most favored nation trading status—was too great a sanction to be credible. Still, the author might have explored other explanations for differences in U.S. outcomes with China and Japan, such as Tokyo's peculiar dependence on external pressure, or “gaiatsu,” to achieve internal policy change (Leonard J. Schoppa, Bargaining With Japan, 1997). This sometimes made reform-minded Japanese officials want to yield to U.S. pressure. (She recognizes, in her conclusions, that her framework focuses mainly on the politics of the “sender of threats,” not the “target” [p. 241].)

The weakest element of the book is Zeng's effort to draw parallels between the “democratic peace” literature and so-called trade wars. The apparent paradox was obviously tempting (democracies fight mainly one another on trade), and one can only applaud, in principle, any attempt to build analytical bridges across the security–economic policy divide. Moreover, the author carefully limits her “trade wars” to a small number (10) of cases featuring trade intervention by both sides, and she shows good understanding of the democratic peace debate. But her claim that these “wars” are comparable to military conflict is simply not persuasive. For example, it strains credibility to argue that because an agricultural subsidy “war” cost “the United States and the European Community … approximately $2.5 billion over three years,” the two “should have as strong an incentive … to avoid trade wars as to avoid military ones” (p. 10).

Not only were the stakes in late-twentieth-century trade wars minuscule compared to those in (now mercifully unthinkable) military conflicts between the same adversaries, but these trade fights also took place within a broad cooperative context—a global trade regime featuring low and declining import barriers—which these democracies were themselves constructing even as they bickered over specifics. In fact, the very creation of the GATT–World Trade Organization regime by countries with competitive trade structures seems an anomaly within Zeng's framework. She might well address it in future research.

The WTO has also changed the nature of trade conflicts, as the author recognizes in her concluding chapter. Before 1995, the United States was relatively free to impose trade sanctions; now, doing so invites the target nation to launch a challenge before that organization's Dispute Settlement Body. This process has taken the teeth out of Section 301, and as long as it remains in effect, unilateral American trade diplomacy will not be as aggressive as it was in the period she treats.

But bilateral trade conflicts remain with us, and so Zeng's analysis remains relevant. The central distinction between competitive and complementary trade relationships is an important contribution to our understanding of trade diplomacy. And if her reach occasionally exceeds her grasp, Zeng's overall analytic sophistication makes Trade Threats, Trade Wars an important contribution to the literature of trade policy.