The Maritime Security Challenges meeting closes

Another difference in our approach

The intense three day Canadian Maritime Security Challenges 2022 conclave in Victoria closes this afternoon. The majority of attendees are in uniform, including a gratifyingly high number of women from several navies, but the organisers offered a well-balanced program on a range of topics covered under this theme.

This morning one of the panelists answered a question about China’s use of the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN, the term for the Chinese navy) and the Belt & Road Initiative globally. The panelist argued firmly that the Chinese deploy the PLAN to protect their expanding trade far more than anything else. This is a debatable interpretation, of course, since many fear the PLAN is expanding China’s footprint around the world for greater presence for presence’s sake.

The striking point is that the importance of trade in China appears diverging from its support in the United States. Between 1945 and 2000, the United States was probably the world’s greatest supporting nation for worldwide trade. U.S. products were everywhere outside of the Iron Curtain for several generations. Trade made us much wealthier than anyone else—period.

I think we have shifted over the past forty years think use the military rather than trade as our primary tool of statecraft yet the prowess of the United States over the past rested on trade as a major pillar. The talk about the post-World War II Liberal International Order, a term I don’t like because I don’t think it details economic but ideological emphases, should be seen as synomymous with the era of expansion of global free trade. In the 1980s, for example, Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and Republican President Ronald Reagan suggested a free trade accord between states of North America would improve the standard of living for all.

Over these years, however, trade just did not seem to deliver for ever growing numbers of working class citizens. Doubts grew as steel and automotive jobs in the ‘Rust Belt’ migrated to Japan in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. H. Ross Perot’s campaigned for the presidency in 1992 by disputing that free trade with Mexico, by name, would benefit U.S. workers, describing a ‘great sucking sound’ as Mexico stole jobs. When the Clinton administration promulgated the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA) in 1994, Republicans opposed it, probably because they opposed most everything Bill Clinton supported but they were also playing on these doubts in some sectors of the public. Free trade has always helped some industries here in the United States while hurting others as trade migrates across borders for many reasons. Rioters five years later rampaged through the streets of central Seattle during a 1999 World Trade Organisation meeting seeking to work towards promulgating a new worldwide trade regime. The devastating effects of the global financial meltdown in 2008 substantially undermined support for trade and any other economic policy advocated by Washington, contributing to the flight of many working class Democratic voters into the Republican Party which has rejecting free trade positions over the past six year. Democrats have always traditionally been lukewarm towards free trade but the generalised public attacks whether those inside the Beltway could be prioritising Americans over others exploded by the 2016 presidential campaign.

The irony of the global financial meltdown in 2008 coinciding with unquestionable Chinese expanded power manifested in many ways, not the least the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic games, should not escape anyone. The world had indeed changed. Beijing did benefit from joining the World Trade Organisation in 2002 but some U.S. businesses did as well.

Trade played an absolutely fundamental part in China’s breathtaking transformation after Deng Xiaoping launched the ‘Four Modernisations’ in the late 1970s. While the current leader Xi Jinping stresses domestic political and economic change in public proclamations, he clearly still sees trade undergirding the economic and political future of the Chinese people. The Belt and Road Initiative is Xi’s pet program linked so deploying the PLAN to protect trade under this Initiative is not at all surprising.

The United States could return to embracing free trade in the future but I suspect the political attacks will continue by those linking the job flight and national decline to foreign trade. Indications are that many jobs died through automation as much as foreign trade but little public discussion focuses on this because that is hard to capture on a bumper sticker. There were many reasons for the decline in working class standard of living and jobs; many of these jobs gone in the uncomfortable reality that higher standards of living link to higher levels of education, for example, as U.S. education standards drop perilously.

The Biden administration has the opportunity to educate on the value of free trade. Unfortunately, this issue is only one among a long line of topics the administration must provide to a skeptical segment of the population. Too much conversation instead goes to the flamboyance characterising politics rather than substantial policy questions.FIN