WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump has pressured many of the United States' largest trading partners to commit to investing trillions of dollars in the country. However, a study released Tuesday raises doubts about whether the money will actually materialize and questions how it would be spent if it did.

"How realistic are these commitments?" wrote Gregory Auclair and Adnan Mazarei of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a nonpartisan think tank that supports free trade. “The short answer is that they are shrouded in uncertainty.”

They examined more than $5 trillion in investment commitments made last year by the European Union, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and the Gulf Arab states of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.

Trump used the threat of punitive tariffs – taxes on imports – to extract concessions from those trading partners, including investment commitments.

The White House has released an even higher investment figure – $9.6 trillion – that includes public and private investment commitments from other countries. Trump himself, who never underestimates his achievements, has put the figure much higher - $17 or $18 trillion - although Auclair and Mazarei point out that "the basis for his claim is unclear."

All the figures are enormous. Total private investment in the United States recently recorded an annual rate of $5.4 trillion. In 2024, the latest year for which figures are available, total foreign direct investment in the United States amounted to $151 billion. Direct investment includes money invested in things like factories and offices, but not financial investments like stocks and bonds.

“The amounts committed are large,” write Auclair and Mazarei, “but their time horizon varies, and the indicators to measure and therefore verify the commitments are generally unclear.” They point out, for example, that the European Union's commitment to invest $600 billion in the United States “does not carry a legally binding commitment.”

The report also finds that some countries would have difficulty meeting their commitments. For the Gulf countries, “the commitments are large in relation to their financial resources,” the researchers write.

“Saudi Arabia appears capable of meeting its objectives, with some difficulty,” they noted. The United Arab Emirates and Qatar would have an even more difficult time and may have to finance investments through loans. “In all three cases, the commitments are not binding, and investments from these countries could fall well below the headline figures,” they write.

Furthermore, “these agreements have been reached under duress,” Mazarei, a former deputy director of the International Monetary Fund, said in an interview. “It's not necessarily being done voluntarily.”

Trading partners could therefore look for ways to escape their commitments, especially if the Supreme Court strikes down the tariffs Trump used to negotiate the unilateral deals. A ruling is expected from February. “Other countries could find a way around it,” Mazarei said.

Still, the Trump administration can resort to alternative tariffs if judges rule that the current tariffs are illegal.

“President Trump agreed to reduce tariffs on countries with which we have trade agreements in exchange for investment commitments and other concessions,” said White House spokesman Kush Desai. “The president reserves the right to review tariff rates if other countries fail to meet their commitments, and anyone who doubts President Trump's willingness to back up his words with action should ask Nicolás Maduro and Iran what they think.”

US troops overthrew and arrested then-Venezuelan President Maduro earlier this month, and Trump ordered the United States to join Israel in bombing Iran last year.

Auclair and Mazarei agree that the investment Trump secures could end up creating jobs, boosting economic growth and making supply chains more secure by bringing manufacturing to the United States.

They note that Trump, in some ways, is taking a similar approach to Biden, using the government's “industrial policy” to encourage more manufacturing in the United States.

But Biden has turned to taxpayer dollars to fund infrastructure projects and incentives for companies. companies invest in green technology and semiconductors. Trump is using the threat of tariffs to make foreign countries - and their companies - bear the cost. And it has abandoned the push to promote clean energy, focusing instead on promoting fossil fuels.

In their report, Peterson Institute researchers express concerns about how investment decisions would materialize and whether they would reflect a strong economy. “This strategy can generate real investment and jobs,” they write, “but it raises familiar concerns about industrial policy: opaque project selection, tenuous accountability and the risk that political criteria crowd out economic efficiency.”

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This story was translated from English by an AP editor with the help of a generative artificial intelligence tool.