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President Biden has kept Trump-era tariffs but pursued a much more nuanced set of other trade policies stripped of China-bashing.
Biden’s industrial and climate policies are crudely protectionist; they have “provoked mass outrage from foreign governments.” Biden joins Donald Trump in “undermining the open trade regime that their predecessors from both parties worked for decades to build.”
So says Dylan Matthews of Vox. To help make the case, Matthews relies on Kimberly Clausing, a former Treasury official, now out of government and teaching at UCLA Law School.
The conversation promotes and echoes a 2019 book by Clausing, Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital, which was also blurbed by Larry Summers. At Treasury, where she was a senior economist, Clausing did good work on global tax evasion, but was known as a traditionalist on trade.
The Matthews-Clausing dialogue hauls out discredited clichés about the efficiency of “free trade,” as well as misrepresenting the continuity between Biden’s policies and Trump’s.
Trump levied 25 percent across-the-board tariffs on most Chinese exports, on the ground that the entire Chinese economic system was riddled with subsidies, dumping, and cheap state-directed capital.
This sensible policy, created by Trump’s one good appointee, U.S. trade rep Robert Lighthizer, was bundled with Trump’s own ugly nativism. Biden has kept the tariffs but pursued a much more nuanced set of other policies stripped of the China-bashing.
Both Matthews and Clausing gloss over the fact that China’s economic system is anything but free-market, and thus makes a mockery of the supposed free-trade regime that they fault Biden for not defending. Instead, they both blame the U.S. for adding to bilateral tensions. Clausing calls on the U.S. to join the thoroughly discredited Trans-Pacific Partnership, which was blocked by Congress as a series of sweetheart corporate deals masquerading as China policy.
The dialogue also uses one straw man after another. “I wonder if the Buy America stuff will even work on its own terms,” says Matthews. “Maybe we do bring manufacturing back, but we don’t bring jobs because it’s a highly automated industry now.”
Clausing heartily agrees. “It’s kind of a fool’s errand to think that you’re going to get a lot of manufacturing jobs out of all this CHIPS money and all this steel protection.”
But the point of CHIPS was never to generate massive numbers of jobs but to get the U.S. back in the game in cutting-edge technology. And in fact, when all the infrastructure, construction, and production jobs are added up, the job gains will likely be in the millions.
Last month, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan delivered a masterful speech disavowing the neoliberal “set of ideas that championed tax cutting and deregulation, privatization over public action, and trade liberalization as an end in itself.”
But the neoliberal zombies live on, fighting a rearguard action to resurrect the strategy of corporate globalism—that so clearly abandoned America’s working families, enriched billionaires, and paved the way for Trump.
