US Trade Representative Katherine Tai appears to be setting records in terms of travel as she pushes a trade agenda that prioritises workers and the environment. An appearance in Philadelphia last week reinforced how determined she is to put economic equity ahead of market access.
It was a laudable gambit that has attracted buy-in from more countries than most would have expected when she secured her role nearly two years ago. Unfortunately, the two years remaining in US President Joe Biden’s first term is not a lot of time in the world of Washington policy agendas.
The shunning of market access until the rest of the world comes to a kumbaya moment on trade is just political aspiration masquerading as a trade agenda because this won’t happen in this time frame.
Tai’s vision recognises that free trade might have given the American consumer cheap toasters and sweatshirts at prices that have barely budged in 30 years and have actually come down in many cases, as manufacturers found cheaper factories offshore. However, it has also led to deep socioeconomic disparities that have brought the US to the brink of civil war.
Speaking at the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia last week, she delivered one of the most stirring defences yet of this new approach. She explained that for every international trip, she also travels somewhere in the United States to better understand the impact of US trade policies.
“I have to have a very nuanced and expansive understanding of who is the United States, what are the component parts of our economy and what are the communities that I’m representing,” she said.
“And that is done by challenging ourselves to get out of Washington,” Tai continued. “To come out to the rest of the country to connect with all the parts of our economy to build relationships here at home in order to be a better representative, because when we forget about the whole of who we’re representing, we end up … on very thin ice.”
Her trip to the “City of Brotherly Love” would certainly have reinforced her determination. On the way, she would have seen first-hand the decaying brick structures on the outskirts of Baltimore and Philadelphia that had, up until sometime in the mid-20th century, produced a sizeable portion of those aforementioned toasters and sweatshirts.
Also machinery, petrochemicals, pharmaceuticals and a wide range of other goods that we’re only just discovering can suddenly become impossible to source in the event of canal blockages or pathogens that shut down factories. If you look closely, you can see some of the rust-covered railroad tracks that connected these dystopian wrecks to the two cities’ ports, also abandoned or converted into entertainment complexes.
The most depressing part of these scenes that run mile after mile are the dilapidated town houses. Many of them are barely more than rubble and inhabited by the people Tai has in mind as she stands firm against cutting trade deals.
Whereas former US president Donald Trump exploited outrage over the hollowing out of manufacturing in the US to get himself into the White House, Tai is tearing up the playbook to address the problem. However, her prospects are diminishing with each passing day.
During her appearance at the World Affairs Council, a black high school student got a chance to ask how Tai’s trade agenda would benefit his community. It was a poignant moment given that black communities have been some of the hardest hit by offshoring, another depressing part of a story that moves from chattel slavery to Jim Crow laws to federal redlining in the real estate market, all of which served to disenfranchise black Americans.
Tai spoke of an initiative under way that studies the effects US trade policy has had on American communities at a more granular level, delving into racial divides and those between rural and urban residents, among others. This study is in its early stages, she said.
Considering that Florida governor Ron DeSantis is a presumed Republican front-runner for the White House in the 2024 election, we have to wonder whether we will ever see results from this study, not to mention the realisation of Tai’s broader vision.
DeSantis embodies all of the hostility that the new Republican Party has for anything that smacks of social justice. He underscored this stance with the war he is waging against black history programmes in his state’s school system.
It is time for Tai to start talking about reciprocal market access with her allies overseas, or at least make it clearer how we get there. Without anything concrete to show for her work, her work is on thinner ice than ever.
Robert Delaney is the Post’s North America bureau chief