One of President-elect Donald Trump's most powerful rallying cries was a call to end unfair trade practices.
Americans may soon learn what a trade war looks like.
"Trade reform and the negotiation of great trade deals is the quickest way to bring our jobs back to our country," Trump said at a Pennsylvania rally in June, one of his most detailed speeches on trade policy. "A Trump administration will change our failed trade policies, and I mean quickly."
It remains to be seen just how far the Trump administration will go in upending decades of U.S. trade deals with the rest of the world.
Those decisions could turn out to be good or bad news for states that rely most heavily on exporting goods and services to China or Mexico.
Trump's threats to get tough come after decades of liberalized trade deals and lower tariffs helped boost import and export traffic around the world. That wave of globalization also produced the backlash from American voters, many of whom lost jobs to that economic upheaval.
Trump has vowed to raise tariffs on Mexico and China. Those higher tariffs would almost certainly cut into U.S. exports, which represent about $2 trillion, or roughly one-eighth of the nation's gross domestic product. One of his most powerful rallying cries was a pledge to reverse the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico, the two top U.S. trading partners.
"We will either renegotiate it or we will break it," Trump said last fall, calling it "a disaster. Every agreement has an end. Every agreement has to be fair."
Popular support for protectionist trade policies has swelled to levels not seen since the Great Depression. British voters who voted to reclaim their independence from the European Union delivered a major blow to globalized trade.
But even before the political wind shifted, the engine of global trade had begun slowing. That's one reason the overall pace of the global economic growth remains relatively weak.
Now, Trump's election will likely extend that protectionist sentiment to the world's largest economy. Unlike other parts of the Trump administration's agenda that require congressional approval, the White House has broad powers to favor or punish U.S. trade partners.
The impact of a U.S. trade war would vary widely from one U.S. state to another.
West Coast states, for example, are much more heavily reliant on Chinese markets while border states see the biggest demand from Mexico.
China represents the third-largest U.S. export market, after Canada and Mexico, accounting for nearly $120 billion worth of goods last year. Overall, that represents less than 8 percent of U.S. exports — or less than 1 percent of total GDP.
Among the most dependent: Washington state, which sold roughly 20 percent of its exports to China last year, or nearly $19 billion worth of goods. Airplanes, the state's largest export by far, made up the bulk of the sales to China.
California exports some $16 billion to mainland China, with computers and electronics accounting for more than a quarter of the total. Texas was the third-largest exporter to the Asian nation, with more than $11 billion worth of products that included chemicals, computers and machinery.
