President-elect Obama has emphasized his intention to focus on restoring America’s squandered credibility with the rest of the world. He might want to reinforce that message for Congress or begin the process of distancing himself from its leadership because, like it or not, trade policy is a tool of foreign policy, and Congress isn’t looking very diplomatic about trade.
Yesterday, House Ways and Means Committee chairman Charles Rangel and Subcommittee on Trade chairman Sander Levin introduced the Trade Enforcement Act of 2009. Among the legislation’s provisions:
- It would make it easier for domestic industry to obtain trade restrictions in antidumping and China-specific safeguard cases.
- It impugns and defies World Trade Organization dispute settlement decisions.
- It compels the Commerce Department to reverse its implementation of a WTO decision last year on the issue of “zeroing.”
- It establishes an Office of the Congressional Trade Enforcer to investigate foreign barriers to U.S. exports and to systematically develop complaints to file with the WTO, among other provisions.
Clearly, the United States is well within its rights to bring cases against its trade partners to the WTO. And generally, if U.S. exporters are facing market barriers that our trade partners committed to dismantle, then I support efforts to seek redress. But it is a bit condescending — indeed it whiffs Rumsfeldian — to so publically berate a WTO decision and question its authority (the official language in the legislation actually includes a several-hundred word diatribe against the WTO Appellate Body’s decision) in the same bill that presumes that our trade partners will heed the WTO’s verdicts. That is the kind of exceptionalism and arrogance for which the president-elect is hoping to make reparations.
It remains to be seen what becomes of this legislation or even if there will be a noticeable uptick in U.S. protectionism. But Congress’s increasingly unilateralist instincts on trade and its willingness to humiliate important trade and security partners in Colombia and South Korea by not considering long-pending trade agreements will definitely complicate Obama’s international fence-mending efforts.
