Trade and Toughness

US trade with China caused large emp. declines. But the main mitigating policy should be worker adjustment programs, not trade negotiations.
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Trade has hurt blue collar workers in manufacturing in Mich, Ohio and elsewhere. But trade negotiations must balance competing interests.
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Growing competition from China and Mexico has cost many manufacturing jobs in Ohio and Michigan. Weak negotiations are not the cause.

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The phrasing implies that any reduction in jobs is bad. Some shifts in employment are valuable (e.g., fewer sweatshop jobs in the US).

"Tough enough" is not meaningful. More restrictive US trade policy toward autos would have benefited autoworkers while hurting consumers.

V likely that any trade effect is from greater competitiveness of China/India/etc rather than tariffs. & recession is big cause of job loss

Job losses occur because of automation, energy prices, tastes, as well as trade. A tougher policy could have been worse not better.

This question is a good but complicated one. I would like to be able to answer but a cursory explanation cannot do justice to the issue.

Many jobs went to the US South. Increases in productivity reduced jobs. New jobs were created due to access to foreign labor.

Technology, globalization, perhaps, unionization are the primary source of lost jobs in Michigan and Ohio. Same is true in Western Europe

Lots of caveats re the benefits of trade, but failure to bargain hard enough is NOT very relevant. We are protectionist in some cases too

"Enough" wrongly implies that policy should have been more protectionist. But freer trade did increase gross job destruction.
-see background information here

Big drop in manu jobs in 2000s, but prob not due to trade deals.

Toughness in trade negotiations is considerably less important than factors such as skill-biased technical change in manufacturing.

Trade matters for job loss, but toughness in trade negotiations has a small effect on trade.

There is nothing in economics or psychology that suggests that being "tougher" gets more. See ultimatum game.