President Trump discussed trade and economic policies
during his address to a joint session of Congress Tuesday night.
Jim Lo Scalzo/AP
The Trump administration is promising an aggressive effort to pry
open foreign markets for U.S. exports, even if that means sidestepping
the World Trade Organization.
The president's
trade policy agenda,
made public late Wednesday, says the administration will "use all
possible leverage" to open global markets to American goods and
services, while cracking down on unfair trading practices by other
countries.
The document says the U.S. will rely on strict
enforcement of American trade laws and won't be bound by international
settlement mechanisms like the WTO.
"In too many instances,
Americans have been put an an unfair disadvantage in global markets,"
the agenda says. ""It's time for a more aggressive approach."
The
document reflects Trump's skepticism of multilateral organizations and
his focus on defending what he sees as America's self-interest.
"It's
been a long time since we had fair trade," Trump said Tuesday in a
speech to a joint session of Congress. "I am not going to let America
and its great companies and workers be taken advantage of any longer."
For more than 20 years, the U.S. has relied on the WTO to
settle disputes, a system the U.S. helped build. But the Trump
administration says the international body is ill-equipped to deal with
competitors like China that it says are neither market-oriented nor
transparent.
Trade advocates worry that attitude could unravel a decades-old commitment to international dispute resolution.
"The
U.S. has been a major force behind international institutions and a
world leader in pushing for trade liberalization," says senior fellow
Carolyn Freund of the pro-trade Peterson Institute for International
Economics. "If the U.S. isn't going to do it, it's difficult to imagine
who is."
Freund warns that other countries might retaliate by adopting protectionist policies of their own.
"That
would hurt our exporters because we'll see them being targets of
various tariffs in other countries around the world," Freund says. "If
we don't have the WTO to moderate trade disputes, it's very easy for
protection to spiral out of control."
The agenda notes that the
U.S. has lost nearly 5 million manufacturing jobs since China joined
the WTO. But academic experts say foreign competition is responsible for
only a fraction of those job losses. Imports from China, though, are
thought to have displaced
nearly a million U.S. jobs.
Trump
wants to crack down on what he considers unfair competition with
anti-dumping and other tariffs. Dumping is the practice of selling goods
for less than they cost to make or for much less than they cost in the
country of origin.
Those tariffs and others are authorized by
U.S. law. The agenda says the administration won't be constrained by WTO
rulings "that undermine the ability of the United States and other WTO
Members to respond effectively to these real-world unfair trade
practices."
Trump was an outspoken critic of U.S. trade deals
during the presidential campaign, and that position won considerable
support among voters who feel left behind by the global economy.
The
administration says its new trade agenda will help "provide all
Americans with a better and fairer chance to improve their standard of
living."
Critics say the focus on foreign competition is partly misplaced.
"It's
a lot easier to blame foreigners, to blame trade, than it is to say the
structure of work is changing," Freund says. "When two, four years down
the road there isn't a sudden boom in the type of manufacturing jobs
that Trump and his supporters are imagining, I think that's when the
reality hits that the policy may sound appealing but it actually isn't a
solution."
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