Trade Language Battles
U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, at his first public appearance here during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation trade ministers meeting, said the U.S. defending its own market against unfair trade practices should not be confused with protectionism -- the definition of which, he claims, “is sort of migrating.”
“Our view in this administration is we can take action to stop unfair trade in the United States market. And the question again becomes ‘what steps can be taken to really lead to free trade?’ And to the extent those steps are confused with protectionism, we find that unfortunate,” Lighthizer said at the closing press conference of the APEC meeting on May 21.
“So our view is we want free trade, we want fair trade, we want a system that leads to greater market efficiency throughout the world,” he continued. “That’s really the underlying objective of organizations like this and the WTO and others.”
Lighthizer, who was responding to a question about whether the U.S. is committed to fighting protectionism, said achieving greater market efficiency “is in all of our interests,” but added that the question is “what do you do to get there?”
For the U.S., he said, “it is defending against unfair trade in our own market and taking steps that we can take to try to discourage non-economic capacity all around the world. And to reduce barriers around the world.”
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Following APEC trade ministers meetings, officials typically develop a joint statement that is subject to negotiation and must be approved by every participating economy. However, the chair statement put out by Anh after this meeting was not negotiated by the trade officials. Instead, it says that “taking into account the diverse inputs presented and discussed at the meeting, the Chair presents the following ununified but prevailing views of APEC economies.”
Among those “ununified issues,” sources said, were support for the multilateral trading system and a pledge against protectionism, which they said was not agreed to by the U.S., as well as the U.S. delegation’s insistence on including “fair” in addition to free trade.
It sounds like there is a battle over word choice here. Many countries want to publicly condemn "protectionism," but the U.S. is concerned that this term is being used too broadly in ways that target U.S. measures. Instead, the U.S. would rather use terms such as "barriers" and "unfair trade."
I have two thoughts on all this.
First, can't both sides use either set of terms? Whatever the U.S. sees as problematic practices being carried out abroad could be referred to as protectionism, right? And whatever the U.S. may be doing that has others concerned could be called "unfair trade practices" or "barriers," right? Why are both sides insisting on their terms, instead of just accepting the alternative terminology, and then accusing the other side of that?
Second, in my view, while every word has some degree of ambiguity, "protectionism" is one of the more precise ones in the trade world. Obviously there are going to be some quibbles over aspects of it, but roughly speaking it means intentional action to favor domestic industry over foreign competitors. By contrast, "unfair trade" and "barriers" are so broad and vague that I'm not sure how useful they really are.