Originally from Investment Treaty Arbitration and International Law - Volume 11

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MR. LAIRD: So, welcome back, everybody.  I think we’re going to start now. We don’t want to be too late on the next panel, and we have an excellent speaker here for you today.

So, as you know, it’s one of the traditions of this conference to have a luncheon keynote speaker to address some of the key themes of the conference, and we’ve had a fantastic array of eminent practitioners, academics, and folks who have dedicated themselves to this field of law.  And today is no less a personage in our speaker.

I’d like to introduce John Veroneau, who’s a partner in the International Trade and Practice Group at Covington & Burling here in Washington, D.C.  He has served in a number of senior positions in the Executive and Legislative Branches, and much of this is set out in his bio in the materials, but I think it’s worthwhile to highlight that he was or he served as Ambassador and Deputy United States Trade Representative under George Bush; and, before that, he was USTR General Counsel.

And since his time in Government, he’s had a wide‑ranging practice in trade and investment and dealing with many of the issues that we’ve already dealt with today in our first two panels, and we’ve asked John to come and give us the benefit of his experience, and I’d like to ask everyone to give him a warm welcome.

(Applause.)

MR. VERONEAU: Thank you, Ian. It’s nice to see you, nice to see some old friends, former colleagues.

I told Ian I was going to take a little bit of liberty this week with my remarks because the favorite parlor game this week in Washington is Trump at a hundred days, so here we go.

I want to talk a little bit about his promises, how he’s done with those, and then a few thoughts about where I see this administration going next on the trade/investment side.  And then, if you’ll indulge me, I want to finish with a few remarks about rising populism, which is not unrelated to President Trump and his election and some other of the global events, but I think the rising globalism is actually quite relevant to what we in this room do in terms of enforcing rule of law and addressing predicaments that investors find themselves in when they are on the receiving end of nationalist or protectionist or unfair practices.