WASHINGTON — The Trump administration bills its success in reworking a trade deal with South Korea as vindication for the “America First” approach the president promised on trade policy, including a robust carrot-and-stick diplomatic style.

“This agreement is visionary and innovative, and it underscores a pattern of failure by previous administrations to negotiate fair and reciprocal trade deals,” a senior administration official told reporters Tuesday night.

Confirming reports from Seoul this week, White House officials said that they had reached a “historic” agreement in principle with the South Korean government to overhaul the existing Korea-U.S. trade deal known as KORUS.

South Korea agreed to limit its steel exports to the United States, a key U.S. goal, and take several steps to open its auto market to American companies. In return, President Donald Trump agreed to exempt South Korea from his new 25 percent tariff on imported steel.

But threatening negotiating partners with tariffs unless they make concessions, as the United States did with South Korea, is a tactic that Washington often used before the creation of the World Trade Organization, though one that did little to reduce bilateral trade deficits.

It also may prove a riskier strategy when U.S. negotiators take on more powerful countries, including China, the largest U.S. trading partner. U.S. negotiators also confront a longer list of issues in talks aimed at renegotiating another trade deal, the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, said the “limited” achievements in the new South Korean accord fell short of the revolution in trade policy that the president has promised.

Still, administration officials regard the South Korean agreement as a big political win for the president and a sign of fundamental change in Washington’s approach to trade disputes.

For nearly a quarter-century, the U.S. government has taken most of its complaints about unfair trade practices to the WTO. The Geneva-based global trade body presides over a quasi-judicial process designed to drain the political heat from disputes, with final settlements often taking years to materialize.

Trump has no interest in letting the heat dissipate. “He’s resurrecting the 1980s — a series of political compromises, mostly with Japan, to deal with U.S. concerns,” said Edward Alden, with the Council on Foreign Relations. “That was the Reagan playbook. The reason it hasn’t been used in a long time is the U.S. made a decision that binding dispute settlement was better than tariffs as a weapon.”

Starting with a 1981 accord that set a ceiling on imports of Japanese vehicles, the United States tried for much of that decade to close its trade deficit with Japan through voluntary export restraints. Dozens of other deals limited shipments of Japanese products such as steel, machine tools and semiconductors, while the 1985 Plaza Accord lowered the dollar’s value in a bid to boost U.S. exports.

The agreements defused politically sensitive controversies but left the U.S. trade deficit with Japan higher at the end of the 1980s than it was when the two countries began implementing the voluntary limits.

Trump and his chief trade negotiator, Robert Lighthizer, lack faith in the multilateral trading system that Republicans and Democrats have shared since the WTO’s founding in 1995. They prefer a nationalistic approach that offers access to the U.S. economy while threatening unilateral tariffs.

The administration’s approach appears to have succeeded in this instance.