How do political elites frame trade policy? This paper identifies three dominant trade narratives in elite discourse. The first is economic, emphasizing trade's impact on growth or employment. The second is sustainable development-based, highlighting trade’s influence on human rights, food security, and climate change. The third is geopolitical, linking trade policy to national security concerns, including territorial integrity, political sovereignty, and a country's standing in the international system.

We argue that the relative importance of these narratives varies across countries and over time depending on the challenges that a country predominantly confronts. When a country faces an economic challenge, such as low growth or high unemployment, the government likely focuses on the economic narrative. When the country faces a geopolitical challenge, the geopolitical narrative will dominate. Finally, the sustainable development narrative will be relatively the most important if the country neither faces an economic nor a geopolitical challenge.

To test this argument, we analyze a novel text corpus comprising statements and press releases from heads of government, foreign ministries, and trade ministries in 26 countries (2010-2024). We leverage few-shot classification and contextual word embeddings to analyze the text corpus.

This paper makes three key contributions. First, it presents an original text corpus of political elites worldwide. Second, it demonstrates the growing centrality of national security concerns in trade policy narratives. Third, it calls on scholars of international politics to incorporate narrative analysis into the study of trade policy, moving beyond the current focus on trade measures.