President Obama said globalization is an irreversible reality Wednesday, indirectly rebutting GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump’s criticism of the United States’s participation in international trade deals.
“The integration of national economies into a global economy—that’s here. That’s done. So the question is not whether or not there’s going to be an international, global economy. There is one,” Obama said at a meeting of North American leaders in Ottawa.
“The question is under what terms are we going to shape that economy. … And us trying to abandon the field, and pull up the drawbridge around us, is going to be bad for us.”
During a Tuesday speech in Pennsylvania, Trump said the U.S.’s recent trade pacts have given American workers a raw deal, singling out the Obama administration-negotiated Trans-Pacific Partnership and the North American Free Trade Agreement as economic harms to the country. The presumptive GOP nominee for president said his trade skepticism wouldn’t start a trade war, since in his view, there already is one.
“A Trump administration will end that war by getting a fair deal for the American people and the American worker,” Trump said. “The era of economic surrender will finally be over.”
In Ottawa, Obama granted that middle-class Americans have “a legitimate gripe about globalization,” speaking in familiar terms about economic inequality and benefits flowing “to the top one percent.”
“The question is, what do you do about it? And the prescription of withdrawing from trade deals and focusing solely on your local market—that’s the wrong medicine,” Obama said. The president highlighted manufacturers losing access to raw materials and decreases in economic efficiency as reasons to resist trade protectionism.
He also decried the “nostalgia” of Trump’s vision of a more blue-collar domestic economy, saying the United States has simply evolved.
“[T]his nostalgia about an era when everybody was working in manufacturing jobs and you didn’t need a college degree and you could go in and as long as you worked hard, you could support a family and live a middle-class life, that has been undermined far more by automation than it has been by outsourcing or the shift of jobs to low-income, or low-wage countries,” he said. “The steel industry is producing as much steel in the United States as it ever was. It just needs one-tenth of the workers that it used to.”
