The Party of Free Trade? (Take Two)

The party of free trade ... HA!

The Bush administration has been quick to point fingers at Europe, India, and Brazil, but the United States deserves much of the blame. That's because, ever since September 11, the administration has made expanding free trade a key part of its efforts against global instability and extremism. As President Bush said at a recent appearance in Miami, trade talks "have a chance to help lift millions of people out of poverty around the world. ... [O]ur government is strongly committed to a successful outcome of the Doha Round." No wonder, then, that trade observers around the world see in the collapse evidence that the United States has ceded the helm of the global free-trade push. As one columnist wrote in Singapore's Business Times, "The breakdown of the Doha Round of global trade talks is a reflection of the failure of the Bush administration to project U.S. leadership in the geo-economic arena."

Nor does it help that the Doha collapse is only the latest in a string of events this year that seem to point to a surrender of free-trade leadership by Bush. First, the Dubai Ports World imbroglio, then the replacement of Trade Representative Rob Portman with an anonymous functionary. Add to this growing congressional opposition to a series of bilateral trade agreements. And the administration has been helpless to hamper the emergence of regional trading blocs outside the U.S. zone of influence--agreements that, in the absence of further WTO talks, point to a world defined less by global free trade than by a patchwork quilt of (often antagonistic) trade regimes. In other words, the lapse of American trade leadership is pointing us toward an era of greater protectionism, tensions, and global economic instability.

If the Bush administration thought governing was hard, I suspect they'll find that being a lame duck President makes it even harder.