TRADER GEORGE:

When It Comes to Free Trade, Bush Outshines His Predecessors (Claude Barfield, September 12, 2004, LA Times)

No administration will ever fully satisfy the free traders, but the Bush White House — with a few notable lapses — has established a record of accomplishment in the area of trade negotiations that is stronger than any other recent administration.

From 1994 to 2002, the United States was largely sidelined by the Clinton administration's inability to get Congress to renew so-called trade promotion authority (the authority for the president to conclude trade agreements and have Congress vote them up or down quickly and without amendment). In 2002, the Bush administration broke the seven-year deadlock (by one vote in the House) and reassumed leadership on trade liberalization.

Admittedly, it stumbled out of the blocks when the president disgracefully caved in to protectionist interests and raised tariffs on steel products. He then signed a retrograde farm bill that increased trade-distorting production subsidies. There were, however, mitigating moves: The president lifted the tariffs (to howls from steel executives and labor leaders) after only 20 months, and he subsequently put forward a bold proposal for agricultural trade reform in the World Trade Organization.

Since then, two novel hallmarks have defined President Bush's trade policy: He links U.S. trade policy with other political, diplomatic and security goals, and he will negotiate free-trade agreements with all comers — individual countries, groups of countries and whole regions — in pursuit of global free trade.

These policies provoked criticism within the U.S. and international trade policy communities, which argue that introducing extraneous political or diplomatic criteria somehow "pollutes" trade policy and detracts from free-market goals. But the administration counters that the pursuit of national interests has always necessitated a meshing of economic with political — and even national security — purposes. This fusion has a particular cogency in the post- 9/11 world, and thus it makes perfect sense for the administration, for strategic reasons, to include Morocco, Bahrain, Jordan and our Iraq ally Australia among its priority trade agreements.

Meanwhile, the entire staff of the Cato Institute is still on a hunger strike because they haven't figured out yet that the steel tariffs were just used to get Fast Track Trade Authority.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 12, 2004 9:03 AM