With Kamala Harris, U.S. Free Trade Skepticism May Continue
In a 2019 presidential debate, Kamala Harris insisted, “I am not a protectionist Democrat.”
But Ms. Harris is not a free-trade Democrat, either. She has said she would have opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1992, which President Biden voted for while serving in the Senate, as well as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an agreement supported by the Obama administration. And in 2020, she was one of only 10 senators to vote against the deal to replace NAFTA, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.
As she pursues the presidential nomination, Ms. Harris’s views on trade and economic issues are likely to become a focal point. Yet unlike former President Donald J. Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, trade has never been a major focus for Ms. Harris. As a result, her positions on trade issues are not entirely known.
William A. Reinsch, the Scholl Chair in International Business at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, called Ms. Harris “a bit of a blank slate, but one most likely to be filled in with trade skepticism.”
In part that is because of her no vote on the U.S.M.C.A., which Mr. Reinsch said “leads me to assume she is part of the progressive wing of the party which is skeptical of trade agreements in general, and particularly of those that involve market access.” But, he said, “there’s not a lot out there to go on.”
Still, in her time as a senator from California and as the vice president, Ms. Harris has adopted some recurring positions that hint at what trade policy might look like if she wins the White House. For example, on several occasions, her objection to trade deals revolved around a common issue: their impact on the environment, and their lack of measures to address climate change.
While the U.S.M.C.A. was negotiated by the Trump administration, it won over many Democrats by including tougher protections for workers and the environment. But Ms. Harris concluded that the deal’s environmental provisions were “insufficient — and by not addressing climate change, the U.S.M.C.A. fails to meet the crises of this moment.”
Her skepticism of the Trans-Pacific Partnership was also partially related to its impact on the environment. She expressed concerns in an interview that it might undermine California’s environmental laws. As a senator, Ms. Harris also sponsored the Green New Deal, an expansive set of policies aimed at addressing climate change.
That has given rise to speculation among trade experts that, if elected, Ms. Harris might lean more on trade as a tool to fight climate change — for example, by striking more limited deals that encourage trade in cleaner products and raise barriers for trade in dirtier ones.
“A Harris presidency would continue and build upon Biden’s trade policy,” said Todd Tucker, the director of Roosevelt Forward, a progressive advocacy and research organization. “Where I would expect to see Harris go even further than Biden is on integrating trade and climate policy.”
Politicians have only recently turned to trade policy as a tool to fight climate change, and not much has yet been accomplished in the area. But it is an approach that is gathering support.
In negotiations with the European Union, the Biden administration pushed for trade measures that would encourage makers of steel and aluminum in Europe and the United States to cut carbon emissions. While those talks have faltered, they could be a model for more actions under a Harris administration, trade analysts said.
Greta Peisch, a former trade official with the Biden administration who is now a partner at the law firm Wiley Rein, said that the Biden administration had been on the cusp of pushing the United States to use trade tools to address climate change. “With the Harris administration, that would be a trajectory that she would be on as well,” she said.
Ms. Peisch added that Ms. Harris could also potentially push forward nascent policies addressing how the United States should work with foreign countries to regulate digital trade. Ms. Harris is familiar with the tech industry from her time in office in California, she said, and could help to set the agenda for how tech issues like artificial intelligence and privacy regulation factor into trade negotiations.
Both Republicans and Democrats have adopted more protectionist stances on trade in recent years, moving away from a time when “free trade” was often an unquestioned pursuit for many politicians. While the Trump administration imposed large tariffs on foreign products in an effort to gain leverage and renegotiate trade deals, the Biden administration has declined to pursue traditional free-trade agreements, instead focusing on domestic investments and other kinds of international partnerships.
Many Democrats now view free trade deals as a reason that American companies have shipped jobs overseas — a view that seems likely to carry into another Democratic administration. Ms. Harris has emphasized reorienting U.S. trade policy to prioritize the impact on American workers, rather than big companies that would prefer to cut costs by outsourcing jobs.
She has also taken a more critical stance against China in her appearances as vice president and her voting record as a senator. And she has denounced the Trump administration’s more aggressive and broad-brush approach to dealing with trade partners, describing the tariffs on China as a tax for American consumers.
In a 2019 presidential debate, Ms. Harris described Mr. Trump’s trade policy toward China as erratic and full of bluster. “He reminds me of that guy in ‘The Wizard of Oz,’” she said. “You know, when you pull back the curtain, it’s a really small dude.”
Mr. Biden was also critical of Mr. Trump’s tariffs during that campaign. Once in office, however, the Biden administration ultimately chose to maintain Mr. Trump’s China tariffs and recently added some new ones, saying they were necessary to prevent cheap foreign products from flooding the United States and protect new factories that have received federal funding.
Mr. Trump has upped the ante in his current campaign for president, proposing tariffs on most foreign goods and floating a tariff of 60 percent or more on goods from China. The Biden administration has said that level of tariffs could damage the U.S. economy, widen the gap between the rich and poor and spark global trade wars that would hurt U.S. exporters.
In her role as vice president, Ms. Harris took part in the administration’s push to lessen the dependence of supply chains on China, including by promoting new partnerships for apparel manufacturing in Central America. In speeches, she often took a hard line on China, rebuking the country during two trips to Asia for its maritime clashes with countries like Japan and the Philippines.
As a senator, she condemned the persecution of Uyghur and minority women in western China and sponsored a bill by Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican of Florida, to impose sanctions on those responsible for human rights abuses in the region. She was also a sponsor of Mr. Rubio’s Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2019, which was a response to China’s increasing control over the former British territory.
“They steal our products, including our intellectual property,” Ms. Harris said in a 2019 debate. “They dump substandard products into our economy. They need to be held accountable. We also need to partner with China on climate and the crisis that that presents.”
#Kamala #Harris #U.S #Free #Trade #Skepticism #Continue