George Bush's Biggest Failure Is Trade Policy

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George Bush's Biggest Failure Is Trade Policy
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/nj/crook2003-12-16.htm
Bush has barely even tried to put the case for liberal trade to American voters or the world at large
by Clive Crook -- D.C. Dispatch | December 16, 2003

The issue on which the Bush administration has most disappointed its natural supporters is trade. Looking ahead a few years, exploding public borrowing may relegate the trade-policy failure to a close second, but the budget deficit has been a great help to the economy lately, and there is time to address the longer-term dangers with spending restraint and enlarged tax revenues. President Bush's anti-trade policies, in contrast, are harming the United States right now—and the medium-term implications of a big reversal on trade are at least as worrying as those distant mountains of public debt.

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Bush has often said that he is dedicated to the twin causes of free enterprise and free trade—an admirably clear position, in marked contrast to most Democrats' instinctive suspicion of both. Unfortunately, it isn't true. The White House has failed to advance either agenda much, and on trade, lately, things have been moving backward. Last week's decision to rescind the tariffs on steel first imposed in 2002—a reversal predictably deplored by many Democrats as a humiliating capitulation to Europe and the World Trade Organization—was welcome, as far as it went. But the real disappointment is that the administration ever applied such deeply misguided tariffs in the first place. And undoing the tariffs will not reverse all of the harm they did. The administration's whole approach to trade policy needs to be rethought.

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The most-telling criticism of George Bush's approach to trade policy is that he has failed—and in fact has barely even tried—to put the case for liberal trade, which he says he believes, to American voters or to the world at large. Bill Clinton, at his best, was a far braver and more effective champion of global free trade. This administration's protectionist actions tell American voters, and foreigners too, that trade is harmful, and that the main thing to be gained from international trade reform is concessions from the other side—whereas in truth the main thing to be gained is consent at home to the lowering of one's own trade barriers.