Kim Hong-Ji/Pool Photo via AP
U.S. National Security Council Coordinator for Indo-Pacific Affairs Kurt Campbell, right, speaks as South Korea’s deputy national security director, Kim Tae-hyo, looks on during a news conference at the Presidential Office in Seoul, South Korea, July 18, 2023.
Yesterday, 17 progressive groups sent a letter to President Biden thanking him for rejecting the efforts of Big Tech to use trade law to undermine regulation of digital privacy, security, and anti-competitive concentration. Biden’s stance is consistent with his broad emphasis of a trade policy that works for workers.
But the thank-you was premature. Biden has just announced one of his worst-ever appointments, of Kurt Campbell to be deputy secretary of state, a nomination that has long been rumored and leaked.
Campbell has been serving as the chief China and East Asia staffer on the National Security Council. His views on “free trade” and the use of trade policy as special-interest corporate backdoor legislation are decidedly old-school—a throwback to the corporate trade policies of the Clinton and Obama administrations that Biden has repudiated.
Campbell held the post of assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs in the Obama administration. He was a big promoter of the late and little-lamented Trans-Pacific Partnership, which was killed by its critics.
Campbell’s many detractors have emphasized his conflicts of interest during his four years out of government when he worked as CEO of The Asia Group and de facto lobbyist mainly for businesses with interests in East Asia and the need for a well-connected fixer. These concerns should not be downplayed. However, as our former colleague Jonathan Guyer has shown, this pattern is all too much the norm among Biden national-security officials.
Far more alarming are Campbell’s outmoded but still dangerous views on trade, which are at odds with Biden’s own new view of trade and the leadership of Biden’s U.S. trade rep, Katherine Tai. One person who cheered the appointment is Rahm Emanuel, another corporate Democrat with an outmoded view of trade. Emanuel, now serving as ambassador to Japan, effused in an interview with the Financial Times about the Campbell appointment that Campbell was “one of the most energetic, creative, and dynamic people” he had worked with.
One has to wonder where this out-of-sync nomination came from. It’s hard to believe that Campbell was chosen over the objections of either National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan or Secretary of State Tony Blinken. Sullivan’s views on trade once closely paralleled those of Campbell, but no longer. Even more surprisingly, Campbell’s coziness with Big Tech is badly at odds with White House senior staffer Bruce Reed, who has been appointed to oversee policy on AI.
One suspects the fingerprints of Big Tech lobbyists, their aggressive chums in Congress such as Senate Finance Committee chair and tech ally Ron Wyden, and the more corporate types in Biden’s inner circle such as former lobbyist Steve Ricchetti. A major player is the chair of the National Economic Council, Lael Brainard, who also happens to be Campbell’s wife.
Still to come is a confirmation hearing. It won’t be pretty. With Biden besieged by the far right that controls the House, and under pressure to deliver on his commitments in the Middle East, it would not be easy for progressive Senate Democrats to vote down Campbell’s nomination. But it could come to that.
