By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, May 5, 2019
Conservatives who gave in to an uncharacteristic bout of
unsecured optimism quickly were reacquainted with our customary disappointment
when President Trump, despite whispers to the contrary, decided to stand firm
on his anti-trade agenda.
The issue was a narrow and relatively straightforward one
from an economic and policy point of view: The Jones Act, an antediluvian
anti-trade measure signed into law by Woodrow Wilson, has many unintended and
destructive consequences, one of which is that Americans in the northeast and
in Puerto Rico are being forced to import natural gas from Russia and the
Caribbean at a time when the United States is producing jaw-dropping quantities
of the stuff — but cannot get it from the places where the gas is to the places
where the people are. This piece of old-fashioned crony capitalism hurts
everyone from utility customers to manufacturers to farmers.
The Jones Act is a product of the nativist “100 Percent
Americanism” movement that grew out of the Great War, and it requires that
ships moving goods or people between U.S. ports be owned by Americans, crewed
by Americans, registered and flagged in the United States, etc. There are no
tankers meeting Jones Act requirements available to transport liquified natural
gas from the Gulf Coast to consumers in New England and Puerto Rico, and New
England’s position has been made worse by the success that environmentalists
have enjoyed in preventing the construction of new natural-gas transportation
infrastructure in the northeast. President Trump had been considered a narrow
waiver to enable natural-gas transport, but in the end backed down — or was
backed down by the business interests that profit from the Jones Act.
But convincing President Trump to defend and entrench
anti-trade measures does not seem to require a great deal of work. Last week,
Senator Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) gave the president a very public ultimatum in
the pages of the Wall Street Journal:
“Trump’s Tariffs End Or His Trade Deal Dies.” The president’s desultory trade
war is wreaking havoc on lives and livelihoods in the communities most
vulnerable to retaliatory measures, and farmers in states such as Iowa are
among those hardest hit. Senator Grassley wants the federal boot off the neck
of Iowa’s agricultural producers before he moves on the NAFTA revisions that the
president is so proud of, the U.S.-Canada-Mexico Agreement (USCMA).
NAFTA, an agreement that was negotiated before there was
anything like contemporary Internet commerce, needed updating, and USCMA makes
some important improvements, particularly in relation to the protection of
intellectual property, an area in which the new accord will largely replicate
the arrangements put forward by the feared and loathed Trans-Pacific
Partnership. USCMA also contains some destructive and ill-advised provisions,
including restrictions on the export of automobiles and automobile parts to the
United States by Canada and Mexico. On balance, USCMA might not be the best we
could do, but we could have done worse, and passing it would ensure at least a
measure of stability and predictability in North American trade relations, even
considering the truly batty provisions that the accord be reconsidered every
six years and that it dissolve entirely in 16 years.
On trade as on much else, Trump gonna Trump. In this
respect, as least, the man is what he says he was.
And that puts Republicans in a tough spot. The president
has weathered the federal investigation into his campaign without very much
damage, the economy is by most measures in very fine shape, and nothing seems
likely to dampen the enthusiasm or erode the loyalty of President Trump’s most
committed partisans. By contrast, the Democrats are wading into socialism,
university-style outrage theater has spread well beyond the campuses, and the
party is divided between callow radicals such as Representative Ilhan Omar and
such politically senescent dust bunnies as Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi. Which is
to say, many Republicans are feeling pretty good about where they are right now
and about where they are likely to be in 2020. There are many people who might
lead a national wave against Trump & Co. in 2020, but it is not obvious
that Senator Elizabeth Warren is one of them, nor Robert Francis O’Rourke, nor
many of the other denizens of the Mos Eisley cantina that is the 2020
Democratic primary.
If the question before Republicans right now is whether
theirs is Donald Trump’s party or Charles Grassley’s party, then the answer to
that is pretty obvious, and it rhymes with harrumph.
But in the long term, policy does matter, and the question of whether
Republicans should be the free-trade party that they long have been or whether
they should embrace a Wallace-Buchanan-Perot-Trump model of populist
neo-mercantilism is one that deserves some attention. And not only because of
the importance of the issue itself, but also because of what their attitude
toward trade says about Republicans’ commitment to sustaining and cultivating
responsible American leadership in world affairs. The United States can beat
retreat, but the world is still going to be there.
Free trade is an excellent and fruitful policy, and it
will remain one even if Republicans drop it and Democrats pick it up, as they
very well might. Republicans should think on that possibility, too, given that
Democrats have of late shown themselves marginally more interested in free
trade than Republicans have.
Farm states and rural communities depend on free trade,
and the Republican party depends on those communities. Maybe they think they
can make up the difference with votes culled from Philadelphia shipyards, but
that does not seem very likely.
There are many policies and fixations that the Republican
party would do well to let go of. The commitment to free trade is not one of
them.
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