Once the scourge of reflexive internationalism, the Bush administration is now dressing in multilateralist garb. The president’s latest concession is pushing the Law of the Sea Treaty, appropriately known as LOST.

The treaty declares all seabed resources to be the “common heritage of mankind,” hits Western mining companies and their sponsoring nations with fees and royalties, and creates a new global bureaucracy to divvy up the spoils. There are authorities, enterprises, committees, commissions, tribunals, and rules galore.

Unfortunately, decades ago the so-called Group of 77, the developing nations’ political lobby, appended this money-making scheme to [add] proposals to improve ocean resource exploitation, regularize petroleum exploration, improve environmental protection, and strengthen navigational freedom. Turn over the globe’s unowned resources to us, the Third World states offered, and we’ll recognize some of your rules–many of which already had been accepted as customary international law. (more…)

A few days ago a new bipartisan foreign policy initiative was launched to emphasize the role that development assistance and diplomacy must play in America’s foreign policy.  One goals of this initiative, Impact 08, is to challenge Presidential candidates to explain how they will integrate greater investments in development and diplomacy into their foreign policy plans.  Not surprisingly, many of the PSA Advisory Board members have also signed onto the statement, “A 21st Century Vision of U.S. Global Leadership Building a Better, Safer World.”  The group is co-chaired by Madeleine Albright (D) and Frank Carlucci (R) and the statement has been signed by prominent D’s and R’s such as Lee Hamilton, Wesley Clark, Bill Frist, Tom Kean, Paul O’Neil, Tom Ridge, George Shultz, Larry Summers, Tony Lake, James Baker, and many others. 

In reading the statement, there was one line that actually struck me because of its timeliness: 

“We must put in place development assistance and trade policies that will increase market access and create greater economic opportunities for both America and our trading partners.”

While I believe that the U.S. must certainly place a high priority on development assistance, it seems equally important to rethink our domestic policies that dramatically undermine those efforts.  What I’m talking about, of course, is the farm bill.  (more…)

This week, there’s been a sudden flurry of questioning the economic value of free trade — on many fronts. Hillary Clinton came out against the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement. Senators renewed their bipartisan effort to bludgeon China about the value of the Yuan — this time by calling China a “currency manipulator” to trigger sanctions rather than by proposing a tariff to directly “compensate” for the manipulation. And one of my colleagues on this blog, Matthew Rojansky, was shocked to discover that some people think that aiming for energy independence (that is, avoiding all trade in energy) is not a smart goal.

Dan Drezner has a useful (if a bit ascerbic) post countering these arguments, especially focusing on China. His main point is that the U.S. benefits from many imports, whether it’s efficiently produced goods or capital that keeps interest rates low (pointedly right now, capital that we borrow from China). The argument that trade benefits consumers and investors in the U.S. is well-known but needs reiterating from time to time.

Why? Because it’s also well-known that trade does not benefit everyone. In the U.S., trade hurts certain import-competing business, and it hurts labor (especially workers without particularly scarce, hard-to-obtain skills). Critics of free trade like Scott Paul at the Huffington Post focus on those who are hurt, arguing that presidential candidates (specifically Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama, and John Edwards but also, he hopes and expects, Republicans, for whom he might cite positions on the immigration reform bill) are “witnessing the toll those [free trade] agreements are taking on America, and they are courageous enough to say it’s time to change course.”

But the free trade agreements are not taking a toll on America. (more…)

This past weekend, a conference meant to jump-start the Doha Round of World Trade Organization negotiations collapsed. As Daniel Drezner points out with an entertaining link, the talks have been struggling — or stumbling, bumbling, fumbling — for months. And the conventional wisdom is that the end of July is a firm deadline for real progress: President Bush’s Trade Promotion Authority is set to expire next spring, and if the talks don’t get on track, no agreement could possibly be ready in time to submit under the fast-track terms. And, the story goes, without Congress’ commitment to take a straight up-or-down vote on a trade deal, America’s elected representatives inevitably will ruin its carefully balanced terms with amendments designed to favor particular industries. The old protectionist log roll that brought us the Smoot-Hawley disaster in 1930 will wreak havoc with 21st century globalization.

But I don’t believe this story. The challenge for the Doha Round of the WTO negotiations is to find an international agreement. The details of the ratification procedure in the United States are not the key question. (more…)

As Americans allow more and more of our products to be made in China, and as we allow the Chinese to own more and more of our economy, we should at least be asking questions about what our increasing dependence on China means for our security. And if we asked these questions, this week’s news would raise grave concerns about how we’re failing to connect our economic and security policies toward China.

Two stories dominated the U.S. headlines about China this week. First, we learned that our trade imbalance with China is continuing to balloon. China’s trade surplus hit a record high last month of $13 billion, driven significantly by a growing imbalance with the U.S. Second, we learned that Chinese President Hu would be meeting with Iranian President Ahmadinejad. And this meeting may not be entirely to condemn Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Instead, China appears to have arranged the meeting in part because, recognizing its increasing need for Iranian oil, the Chinese government seeks to further engage Iran notwithstanding the country’s nuclear program.

What these two news stories illuminate is a dangerous disconnect between our economic and security strategy. As we know, money is power and economic might can be as important as military strength. What’s concerning is that we have an economic policy that is openly selling our country’s assets to China and not even pressing the Chinese to upgrade a clearly undervalued currency. This, in turn, makes us weaker vis-à-vis China and further limits our discretion to deal with the Chinese government head-on if they ultimately try to undermine international efforts to contain a nuclear-hungry Iran.

We’ve known for a long time that the “spend now and saddle the future with debt” economic policy of the Bush years is bad on its face because it burdens our children with paying back today’s excesses. But this week’s news stories show it’s a potentially dangerous policy as well.