In May 1994, during the debate about United States’s entry into the World Trade Organization, The Washington Post wrote:
“The United States is the world’s largest exporting nation (and an) inability to get grievances resolved has been a cause of enormous losses and frustration for American exporters over the years. The WTO is the remedy.”
The Washington Post, always more than a bit smug when writing of Republicans, told its readers that then-House Republican Whip Newt Gingrich, who opposed U.S. entry into the WTO:
“You will not be greatly surprised to hear that the patriotic issue of national sovereignty is getting a lot of attention these days from protectionists fighting to preserve the regulations that restrict trade and competition.”
There are two ironies in The Washington Post op-ed.
The first is calling Mr. Gingrich as well as his fellow GOP caucus members opposed to the WTO “protectionists” when they were, at the time, anything but. Indeed, most of the members of the House GOP caucus were strict free-market ideologues, though most—like President Reagan—favored “free but fair” trade.
Counter to some now in the GOP, who embrace unrestricted “free trade” with veritable religious dogma, Mr. Reagan embraced traditionally conservative notions of fairness in foreign trade. He negotiated voluntary quotas and tariffs on everything from Japan’s cars to clothespins. At the time, Japan had enormous non-tariff barriers to imports of U.S. automobiles, while clothespins were being dumped on the U.S. market at below the foreign producers’ cost in order to destroy U.S. manufacturers. Mr. Reagan wasn’t being a “protectionist”; he simply ameliorated unfair trade advantages our foreign trading partners were using to cheat in trade and to harm U.S. businesses.
The second irony that The Washington Post ignored in its editorial was that, by the newspaper’s own admission: “The United States is the world’s largest exporting nation.” That was true, perhaps, in 1994, at the time of the editorial, but it is certainly not true today. Today, that standard is held by the People’s Republic of China, and largely since it joined the WTO in December 2001, albeit with special concessions advantageous to China as a “developing nation” granted by other members.
By J.G. Collins
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