Dwight D. Eisenhower photo

Statement by the President Upon Signing the Trade Agreements Extension Act of 1953.

August 07, 1953

I HAVE TODAY signed the Trade Agreements Extension Act of 1953 extending our trade-agreements legislation for an additional period of one year and providing for the creation of a Joint Executive-Legislative Commission on Foreign Economic Policy.

This action by the Congress, coupled with the excellent progress made in the field of customs simplification, reaffirms the will and purpose of the United States to cooperate with other friendly countries in the development of a large and growing volume of world trade on a mutually profitable basis. In addition, through the establishment of a Foreign Economic Policy Commission, this legislation will enable the executive and legislative branches of our Government to undertake a careful and thorough review of our foreign economic policy in order to make it more responsive to the needs of our time.

Our present trade-agreements program, although helpful in the past, is inadequate in many ways and does not fully meet the requirements of our international relations today.

Its renewal, however, provides us with a breathing space, during which the United States will have the opportunity to develop a policy based upon a full understanding of our national interests, domestic and foreign, and an appreciation of the fact that those interests are inseparable from the interests of the free world as a whole.

I am confident that the Commission created by this law will approach its task in this spirit and that its work will provide the foundations on which a new and constructive foreign economic policy can be erected.

Note: The Trade Agreements Extension Act of 1953 is Public Law 215, 83d Congress (67 Stat. 472).

Dwight D. Eisenhower, Statement by the President Upon Signing the Trade Agreements Extension Act of 1953. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/231892

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