Robert Lighthizer’s new book calls from strategic decoupling from China
Former U.S. trade representative Ambassador Robert Lighthizer views the decades of U.S. trade deficit with China as a “wealth transfer.” In his recent interview with EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program, he outlined a playbook to beat China at its own game through strategic decoupling, very much the same thing China has been doing to the United States, he said.
In his new book “No Trade Is Free: Changing Course, Taking on China, and Helping America’s Workers,” he recalled a meeting he attended in Beijing in November 2017, during which he told Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), that the U.S.-China trade relationship was unbalanced.
And from there, Mr. Lighthizer said he changed the tone of the trade talks that used to be rounds of vague commitments with no follow-ups on actions, which reset with each new U.S. administration.
“I was never interested in one of these things where the status quo favors the other side by definition,” he told The Epoch Times. “And as long as they can kick the can down the road, they’ll maintain that benefit, that preference, in many cases, that transfer of wealth.”
‘Net Transfer of Wealth’
To Mr. Lighthizer, it’s not a problem when a country runs a trade deficit with another over short-term periods. However, decades of deficit in the amount of hundreds of billions of dollars—as is the case of U.S. trade with China—is essentially a “net transfer of wealth,” he said.
The U.S. trade deficit with China has nearly quadrupled since December 2001, when China joined the World Trade Organization, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The total trade deficit from 2002 to 2022 totals over $5 trillion—one-fifth of the U.S. GDP in 2022.
During the same period, the U.S. net investment position—how much Americans own all over the world versus how much the rest of the world owns in the United States—grew nearly six times to a negative $16 trillion in 2022.
By Jan Jekielek and Terri Wu
