Who’s The Belligerent Unilateralist Now!
Nick Kristof makes the best possible liberal case for the Columbia Free Trade Agreement, noting that it would secure permanent duty free access to American markets for Colombians, thus increasing the wealth of poor Colombians working in export oriented industries. All of this is well and good, while the agreement would probably do little to either economies, on balance, trade liberalization and a steady regulatory environment are good things.
Where Kristof goes a bit off base, however, is when he talks about the agreement’s broader implications for our place in the world as a cooperative member of the international system. Kristof says that “If the Colombia free-trade pact is rejected and the U.S. backs away from its commitment to expanding trade, that may be the Democrats’ equivalent of Kyoto, signaling a retreat from internationalism.” Kristof is right to say that pursuing trade agreements and liberalization is just as much a part of “internationalism” as arms control or any other multilateral international agreements, but C-FTA isn’t comparable to Kyoto, or even other trade agreements. That’s because the Bush administration has managed to push plenty of FTAs – Singapore, Jordan, CAFTA – and yet didn’t get any points for being trade internationalists. That’s because these trade agreements are negotiated on a bilateral basis in which the US doesn’t have to make many concessions and mostly gets to impose their intellectual property standards onto poor countries desperate to trade with the US. A key part of internationalism is making meaningful concessions to other members of the international community, which the administration is not particularly urgent to do – in any arena.
The trade liberalization that Kristof is talking about is one that the Bush administration has pointedly refused to pursue. That would the reduction of agricultural subsidies as part of pursuing some sort of treaty or agreement coming out of the Doha round. Bush has not done this. He hasn’t tried to reduce subsidies or approach Doha with anything resembling urgency. Instead, we’ve been signing these one-off trade agreements that don’t do much to eliminate the few remaining structural barriers to total trade liberalization. Compared to our progress on Doha, or the lack thereof, whether or not the Democrats torpedo C-FTA is really small potatoes*
* It’s worth nothing, however, that if Clinton or Obama were to follow up on campaign rhetoric and unilaterally demand renegotiation of NAFTA, that would be the type of bad global citizenship that Kristof would be right to criticize.
