Trade as Foreign Policy

Suzanne Nossel has a smart list up of "of 5 issues where progressives are well-positioned to build public support based on existing policies, and 5 areas where more work needs to be done" and wisely includes trade on the list of things where viable progressive consensus seems lacking. A big part of the problem here, I think, is that not only are liberals famously divided about trade issues, but these disagreements almost exclusively conceptualize trade issues as economic policy disputes rather than foreign policy ones. Obviously, though, trade agreements are diplomatic pacts formed with foreign countries and form -- along with formal and informal military alliances, economic sanctions, international legal institutions, etc. -- part of the wide range of non-military tools that can impact foreign governments' behavior.

For my part, I've become considerably more skeptical about the economic case for the multilateral trade regime as it currently exists than I was three or four or five years ago. At the same time, though, I've become more convinced of the central role efforts to construct a globalized marketplace have traditionally played -- and should continue to play -- in the liberal view of American foreign policy. What's more, I worry that the people who outline trade policy don't really consider the national security consequences of some of our ideas. People who are rightly leery of things that might provoke a new arms race with China strike me as all-too-eager to embrace policies that will play in Beijing or New Delhi as America-led efforts to strangle Chinese or Indian prosperity in the crib. Adopting such policies would be, I think, a major problem. At the same time, the existing multilateral process has pretty clearly run aground and is creating way too many problems for far too many people to stay viable. The world pretty desperately needs creative ways to get things back on track and redress the many valid concerns about the impact of these agreements in a way that actually facilitates the opening of markets.

Comments

Sorry, off topic, but... The "Losing Nicaragua, Again" article is disgusting. There's the title, of course. There's also the contents.

"The seemingly unavoidable outcome of next Sunday's election is a Nicaraguan tragedy, losing at the ballot box what was won two decades ago by the blood of contra fighters and the risking of Ronald Reagan's presidency."

We should be clear: what Novak is referring to is the Contra war illegaly engineered by Washington in which tens of thousands of Nicaraguans were killed by a cadre of marauding terrorists (the Contras). Only someone deeply depraved would celebrate that war, and yet Novak does. Simply disgusting.

Posted by Mark | October 30, 2006 10:19 AM

Ag subsidies, Matt. Ag subsidies.

Posted by Blake Hounshell | October 30, 2006 12:03 PM

Trade is also a humanitarian issue. One frustration I have with more protectionist dems is their failure to recognize the incredible leaps places like India nad China have taken over the last 15 years, due in large part to relatively free trade. There are 500 million fewer people living in extreme poverty in Asia as a result, and growing middle classes in both places. Of course this has led to a trade deficit, but that deficit has gone a long way to bettering the living standards of 40% of the world's population.

Posted by tomboy | October 30, 2006 12:04 PM

I always saw Clinton's trade policy as being both economic and foreign policy. On the one hand, I think he thought we would find a way to deal with negative effects of globalization here and that, in the end, the good would outweigh the bad.

But I also believe he was trying to set up a situation in which other countries became somewhat dependent on the US as trading partner and trade arbiter, thus finding themselves in a situation where they were motivated to avoid actions that would hurt us as their interests as our interests became more and more inextricable. In the '90s, I saw this aspect as perhaps more important than the economic one, and I thought it was the right move for the times.

Posted by Kiril | October 30, 2006 12:45 PM

Sorry, off topic, but... The "Losing Nicaragua, Again" article is disgusting.

Yes, it is.

Posted by Matthew Yglesias | October 30, 2006 12:54 PM

Ag subsidies, Matt. Ag subsidies.

Ag subsidies, yes, but also textile-import quotas, madcap efforts to use the large size of our domestic market to pressure developing countries to adopt dubious pharmaeceutical rules, and several other things.

Posted by Matthew Yglesias | October 30, 2006 12:55 PM

One thing not quite on Nossel's list is the need to both cut and reorganize military spending. In fact, it's telling that she isn't even willing to make clear what her own position is on what progressives should be telling people about the "size and shape of the military". Nobody really knows what we are annually spending on the military (thanks to Iraq), but it seems pretty clear that it is double what we spent in 2000 (which was a bit less than $300 billion; we're at $500 billion in straight up defense department funding now, plus I believe substantial additional monies for Iraq). The great majority of this new money is spent on fancy new weapons technologies that have little to do with the threat posed by Islamic extremists armed with box-cutters. Instead, it seems to be aimed at some misty goal of dominating the entire world militarily, which is of course a fool's errand. We are very soon going to be in a position where we could really use a couple of hundred billion extra dollars for actually useful and productive things.

Posted by MQ | October 30, 2006 3:25 PM