Asked Friday about Hillary Clinton’s position on the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, spokesman Nick Merrill offered a tepid statement intended to give heart to the anti-trade Left. “The goal,” he remarked, “is greater prosperity and security for American families, not trade for trade’s sake.”
In short, candidate Clinton is gently but consciously positioning herself against free trade, aware that the opposite position might alienate supporters.
We have seen less subtle expressions of this before.
In 2008, candidate Barack Obama railed against free trade, suggesting even that the North American Free Trade Agreement (by then 14 years old) should be renegotiated. Meanwhile, his advisors met with the Canadian government to reassure them that their candidate was simply lying about his position. As the Canadians would later recount, Obama advisor Austan Goolsbee told them that Obama’s comments “should be viewed as more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans.”
Clinton is now playing the same game. Her new cautious-yet-disparaging comments come just over two years after she was vigorously cheerleading for the looming Trans-Pacific Partnership.
“This TPP sets the gold standard in trade agreements to open free, transparent, fair trade, the kind of environment that has the rule of law and a level playing field,” she said in November 2012. She went out of her way to mention the agreement’s “strong protections for workers and the environment.” This makes her recent statement seem all the more cynical.
Congress should ignore Clinton — and also the sincere naysayers on trade — and approve Trade Promotion Authority, which will help prevent China from dominating trade in emerging markets worldwide at Americans’ expense.
TPA simply guarantees a quick up-or-down vote in Congress on upcoming agreements the Obama administration negotiates, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The new legislative incarnation of TPA does more to protect U.S. sovereignty and congressional prerogatives than versions that were previously in force. It provides for unprecedented congressional oversight of the negotiating process and it bars agreements from making any changes to U.S. law without further congressional action.
It also requires that any trade agreement be made public for 60 days before it is signed. In short, it establishes the sort of transparent process that might have assuaged most of the skeptics’ concerns, had it been employed during President Obama’s nuclear negotiations with Iran.
The old objections to free trade remain as incorrect today as ever, based on insular thinking that no nation can afford to entertain in the modern world. The greatest exemplar of a society closed to trade is North Korea, whose dire poverty is no coincidence. But less totalitarian ideologies of self-sufficiency die hard anyway.
In the long run, the erasure of artificial political trade barriers helps promote economic freedom and broaden the scale of human cooperation. As any sensible economics professor can explain, greater scale means more opportunities for specialization, which in turn helps all parties produce greater wealth with the same or less effort.
The world is an increasingly open place, and it is up to the United States government whether its citizens will be able to take part as new opportunities arise. This is why, the cynicism of presidential candidacies notwithstanding, Clinton was right the first time. Congress should adopt TPA and approach the coming trade agreement with bipartisan optimism and transparency.
