This president may be proving educable on matters of trade after all. The news late this week certainly beats the news from the last month. Maybe free trade will win in the end.
On Thursday, the New York Times, in its news section yet, called President Trump's decision to rejoin the Trans-Pacific Partnership "stunning." But why the newspaper of record would say that is beyond some of us. This presidency is a series of bluffs, tweets, rants and walk-backs. Not to mention full-tilt reversals.
But the president's decision on TPP could be good news. At least we know that Donald Trump can rise above his promises. A lot of politicians can't. (We remember Stephen Colbert emceeing some overbearing correspondents' dinner during the Bush II presidency, joking in front of the honored guest that the president's "mind never changes, even when the facts do.")
According to dispatches from the nation's capital, the current president told a gathering of lawmakers and governors from farm states that he had ordered his advisers to look into rejoining the Trans-Pacific Partnership. That was the Obama-era deal with Asian countries that President Trump railed against when he was Candidate Trump. Now, however, the president has got himself frightfully close to a trade war with China, and he needs all the help he can get. So do the rest of us.
Mainland China--not to be confused with our allies, and the democratic Chinese, in Taiwan--is indeed a bad actor on the world trade stage. The president has always been right about that. Especially when it comes to intellectual property. The ChiComs apparently think it's just business as usual to reverse-engineer products invented in other lands. Or outright steal them. Beijing also believes in global free trade, as long as it doesn't have to participate. Open trade between other countries is just fine, according to the Reds in Beijing, but they'll support their own markets with subsidies and tariffs, and that's just the beginning of their trade barriers.
The TPP was supposed to bind several Asian countries and the Americas in an effort to push China into reforms. When President Trump pulled the United States out of the pact hours into his presidency, business leaders and Republicans in Congress were panicked. The tariff fight over the last month hasn't helped.
Restoring TPP, backing off from imposing tariffs, and pushing China toward a real free-trade system certainly beats certain other suggestions. Such as the idea, floated in Washington recently, to bring back the old Commodity Credit Corporation, invented during the Great Depression.
The CCC would borrow money (that our kids would repay) to bail out farmers hurt by Chinese retaliation to U.S. tariffs. It could possibly give American farmers of many crops an incentive not to produce, too, but at least it would add to the national debt.
The CCC was an emergency stop-gap measure during the country's top economic crisis a century ago. If the president thinks his administration needs to pull out these old bailouts in the years soon to come, maybe he can be convinced his economic plans are putting the country on the wrong course.
Better not to have trade wars at all. Better to push mainland China into becoming a better actor. Better to have allies surrounding China help us do that. And allow our farmers (and factories workers and auto makers) compete on a level field, where they will do just fine.
Getting back into the Trans-Pacific Partnership is a good step. Let's take it.
Editorial on 04/14/2018