SYMPOSIUM EDITORS' NOTE: ANTITRUST AND TRADE

"5 Yet, the interaction between antitrust and international trade has perhaps never been as complicated as it is today. [...]Motta concludes that the extent to which international trade and competition policies align "depend[s] on the specific market and political and domestic circumstances of each sector. The review occurred at a time of rising trade tensions between the united states and China, and many commentators attributed the transaction's failure to politics.10 The authors illustrate that "[w]hen a buyer's nationality is different from that of the target, there is an increased risk that trade policy concerns could intrude on antitrust analysis,"11 referring to examples such as CocaCola/Huiyuan Juice where the deal was prohibited reportedly for those reasons. sector-specific concerns could also play an important role in merger control reviews worldwide and may lead to reviews beyond the realm of "classic" antitrust, such as in Bayer/Monsanto or AT&T/Time Warner. "16 On the other hand, the Commission in Siemens/Alstom was not persuaded by the parties' arguments about competitive constraints from Chinese manufacturers and its prohibition decision led to criticism and the widely-commented Franco-German "manifesto" for a reform of key tenets of EU competition policy.17 Behboodi submits that in an environment where national industries face competition from state-backed foreign companies, it is not "impertinent" to ask whether broader trade policy considerations should play a role in antitrust reviews.18 In the end, according to Behboodi, " 'consumer welfare' essentially serves as a proxy for a country's broader economic, industrial, and trade objectives,"19 which suggests that the consumer welfare standard may already accommodate such broader considerations. According to Bush, the opacity of the competition enforcement regimes in China "obscures the extent to which any specific action-or inaction-actually aims to advance conventional antitrust goals of consumer welfare and economic efficiency, reinforce policies compatible with them, or subordinate them to higher priorities.