Giving Obama's Free Trade Legacy Some Much Needed Perspective

Over the last several weeks, Americans have been treated to a pretty constant stream of news stories applauding President Obama's new found affection for free trade.  The impetus for this fawning coverage is obvious: since the end of 2012, the Obama administration has repeatedly thrust trade - in particular the inclusion of Japan in the ongoing Trans-Pacific Partnership talks and the launch of FTA negotiations with the EU - into the spotlight.  The administration does deserve some credit for finally, after four years of depressing inaction, putting the United States back in the free trade game (a game we not only used to dominate, but also kinda, you know, invented), but the media reaction to these announcements - i.e., assuming the FTAs' timely completion and all-but-anointing President Obama to be the greatest free trade president in the history of anything ever - has been utterly ridiculous.  Fortunately, Cato's Dan Ikenson has finally had enough and today does his best Winston Wolfe impression by throwing some much-needed cold water on the media's coronation party.  First, he quickly recites the administration's actual record on trade so far:

[B]efore anyone awards the president the Nobel Trade Prize for a job yet done, consider this: in four-plus years, this administration has concluded zero trade agreements, while launching 13 WTO cases against various trade partners. For 50 months, enforcement and domestic protectionism—not liberalization—have dominated the trade agenda....

Yep.  Next, Ikenson mentions another, ahem, minor hurdle to completing ambitious trade agreements in a rapid fashion - our totally unnecessary lack of a lead trade negotiator:

For starters, wouldn’t the president have delegated someone capable and experienced to take ownership of the trade agenda if he were really committed to leaving a trade policy legacy? U.S. trade representative Ron Kirk announced more than one year ago that he would be leaving his post early in a second Obama administration. Yet there is nobody vetted and ready to take the reins of trade policy. Kirk’s official resignation came at the end of last month—though he has been hanging around to help out on account of … “sequestration.”

The most prominent name floated for U.S. Trade Representative has been the OMB’s Jeff Zients, the person most closely associated with President Obama’s proposal to subsume the USTR under the enforcement-centric Commerce Department—again, not exactly the substance of trade legacy-building. Members from both parties in Congress have demanded a better candidate if the president expects his trade agenda to be taken seriously.

I'd be remiss not to note that the Obama administration also had a really tough time finding Kirk back in 2008-09 because at least one candidate (rightly, in retrospect) saw that trade policy would be a low priority in the Obama White House and thus turned the job down.  But I digress...

Back to the current situation.  Ikenson then points out the myriad landmines in the TPP and EU deals themselves:

Accomplishments, not rhetorical intentions, should serve as the basis for our judgments. Anyone can announce initiatives. President Obama is quite proficient at reciting litanies of initiatives. But it remains to be seen how he handles the situation when the deals require his confronting allied interests and dismantling their protectionist perches. In fairness, the administration’s trade negotiators have been working hard toward a Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement with 10 Pacific-rim nations. But let’s see where this goes before we start writing history. There’s still a lot of ham left on that bone.

The administration has verbally committed to completing the TPP negotiations by the end of this year and the just-announced Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership negotiations with Europe by the end of next year—both virtual impossibilities given where things stand in those negotiations and between the White House and Congress. So we already have a credibility problem.

Both sets of agreements are likely to include provisions that penetrate deeper than usual into the domestic regulatory space of all countries involved. Understandably, this is generating resistance—particularly to U.S. demands for extra investor and intellectual property protections. Some of the groups that were instrumental in defeating SOPA and PIPA legislation last Congress are beginning to mobilize in response to concerns that the TTIF could be a backdoor to IP-based restrictions that affect internet use and data sharing, among other issues. U.S. negotiators are making serious demands on matters they claim to be central to 21st century trade, yet they appear unwilling to give ground on the 18th century protectionism still afforded U.S. textile and footwear producers.

I bring attention to these details not to pick a fight about Obama’s trade record, but to emphasize that facts matter. So do characterizations. Readers should know about growing resistance to U.S. demands that threaten to prolong or derail the TPP and TTIP negotiations. Readers should know that if the talks break down or produce less ambitious outcomes, that there is probably more to the story than the official U.S. account, which will pin the blame on foreign intransigence. Readers should know that the U.S. government engages in all sorts of protectionist policies and then relies on media to characterize trade as a zero-sum contest between U.S. producers and foreign producers. Under this rubric, U.S. protectionism is presented as a necessary response and it becomes patriotic to support our own trade barriers—the very protectionism that hurts us the most....

Furthermore, the administration has barely begun to do anything substantive with respect to securing Fast Track negotiating authority from the Congress, which it will need to get any trade agreements approved by the legislature. Congress is largely in the dark about what the administration has been negotiating in the TPP. The administration’s cavalier attitude toward this potentially arduous process betrays either a lack of understanding or concern that Congress, if it grants that authority, will attach all sorts of conditions that may render moot the past couple years of negotiations on the TPP....

AEI's Claude Barfield also deftly details the many serious hurdles facing the TPP and the TTIP - definitely worth a read. (Conclusion: "The administration is misguided in bowing to the EU’s frantic plea for a crash, two-year timetable for FTA negotiations. Such a course will fail — and of much greater significance, it may well imperil a successful conclusion of the strategically and economically vital TPP negotiations."  Ouch.)

Finally, Ikenson explains what's really driving President Obama's new embrace of trade, and it's hardly flattering:

Alas, President Obama has not found religion on trade after all. He’s merely run out of options. The TPP was motivated from the outset as a means to regain some of the influence—on policy and institution-building in the Asia-Pacific—presumed to have been lost to China, as America toiled in Iraq and Afghanistan. Persistently high unemployment, despite four years of stimulus, subsidies, and bloated federal spending, had finally led the administration to its last resort: trade liberalization.

So there you have it. A president who has settled on trade agreements as a last resort to spur investment and create jobs shouldn’t inspire too much confidence that he’s in it for the long haul and that he’ll be willing to make the tough political decisions ahead, particularly if the economy starts to improve and his affection for trade agreements proves fleeting.

Oof.  I'd say that Ikenson's bitter assessment is pretty much a pitch-perfect review of President Obama's real free trade legacy (so far, at least), and it's either telling or sad that the media can't seem to grasp these easily Google-able facts.  Indeed, foreign media reports of the administration's pre-negotiations with Japan regarding its entry into the TPP hardly inspire confidence in the President's resurgent free trade bona fides:

Japan plans to agree to let the United States maintain its automobile tariffs for a certain period during preparatory talks for joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade negotiations, sources said Tuesday.

As the United States fears a possible surge in Japanese auto exports to the U.S. market under the TPP, Japan is set to agree that the United States will be allowed time to eliminate the tariffs in an attempt to extract a U.S. concession over Japan’s agricultural tariffs once it enters the TPP negotiations, the sources said.

Japan’s participation in the TPP negotiations has been opposed by the U.S. auto industry, as well as by Japanese farming groups fearful of cheaper agricultural imports. Japan currently imposes high tariffs on farm products such as rice and wheat to protect domestic farmers.

The United States currently imposes tariffs of 25 percent on trucks and 2.5 percent on cars.

To summarize: the United States is demanding the maintenance of high tariffs on imported trucks (and lower ones on cars) as the "price" of Japan's entry into free trade negotiations, and in return, Japan will get to keep high tariffs on farm products like rice and wheat.  Such a deal is sadly illiberal but it really shouldn't shock anyone: it's quite similar to the one that the administration worked out for the US-Korea FTA re-negotiation back in late 2010.  But, still, since when does vigorously protecting protectionism permit fawning reports of a president's commitment to free trade?

Seriously, man. What the...?

Thus, all the breathless media coverage of the president's free trade renaissance places the responsible journalists into one of three categories: (i) ignorant dupes fooled by savvy USTR and White House press shops; (ii) hopeless, overly-optimistic Obamaphiles blinded by their love for The One; or (iii) complicit hacks acting as the administration's unofficial PR wing.  None of these is very flattering, but - after comparing the media's Pollyannaish reports with the realities presented by Ikenson, Barfield and other trade experts - there really isn't any other option.

Fortunately, there's always foreign media.