The Trade Challenge, With Edward Alden and Ana Swanson (Election 2024, Episode 3)

LINDSAY:
Welcome to The President's Inbox. I'm Jim Lindsay, the Mary and David Boies distinguished senior fellow in U.S. foreign policy here at the Council on Foreign Relations. This is the third episode in a special 2024 U.S. election series here on The President's Inbox. From now until election day, I will be sitting down with experts to unpack some of the most pressing challenges in the next president's foreign policy inbox. This week's topic is the trade challenge.

With me to discuss how U.S. trade policy has evolved in recent years and how it might change with a President Kamala Harris or a President Donald Trump, are Edward Alden and Ana Swanson. Ted is a senior fellow at the Council and the Ross Distinguished Visiting Professor at Western Washington University. Ted specializes in U.S. economic competitiveness, trade, and immigration policy. His writings include the book Failure to Adjust: How Americans Got Left Behind in the Global Economy. His newest book titled When the World Closed Its Doors: The COVID-19 Tragedy and the Future of Borders, which he co-wrote with Laurie Trautman, will be published in January.

Ana is a reporter for the New York Times. She covers trade, employment, and markets with a specialization on the Indo-Pacific region in China in particular. She previously was editor of Foreign Policy Magazine's South Asia Channel and the editor-in-chief of the China Economic Review based in Shanghai. She lived in China for eight years, and while there co-founded the International China Journalists Association. She has received numerous awards for her reporting, including an Edward R. Murrow Award. Ted and Ana, thank you for joining me on The President's Inbox.

SWANSON:
Thank you.

LINDSAY:
So first question I want to ask you, Ana and Ted are either one of you advising either formally or informally, the Harris or Trump campaigns?

SWANSON:
No.

ALDEN:
No, I'm not.

LINDSAY:
Okay. So let's dive into the question of U.S. trade policy. I'd like to begin with the big picture. Trade obviously matters to the U.S. economy. Some forty million plus jobs depend on imports or exports. That's roughly one in five jobs in the United States. But as I look at the conversation about trade, it seems that no one's really happy with U.S. trade policy. So perhaps Ted, maybe you could start us out by laying out what you see as the nature of the debate over trade in the United States.

ALDEN:
Well, I think we've seen the debate evolve quite dramatically in the last decade or so. I mean, the approach that both Republican and Democratic administrations took for a couple of decades was simply to try to expand trade. More exports were good, more imports were fine as well. Let's do agreements that expand opportunities for American producers and lower costs for American consumers. I think you can trace it all the way back in some ways to the 2008, 2009 financial crisis. But what we've seen is far more focus on some of the distributional consequences, on the jobs that get lost to import competition.

And then especially, and Ana can talk more about this, the rise of competition from China and what that means both economically and geopolitically. So political leaders really in both parties in different ways, but we see this in both parties are now far more concerned about the potential negative consequences of expanding trade, especially with China, than they are about the positive welfare benefits in terms of more jobs and opportunity for Americans and lower prices for American consumers. So the debate has really moved from a focus on opportunity to a focus primarily on risk.

LINDSAY:
Ana, I want to invite you to join in here and perhaps take up Ted's invitation to talk about the China piece of this conversation.

SWANSON:
Yeah, absolutely. Of course, China's entry into the global economy had a huge impact on the world and on the American economy and on American people's livelihoods, on the ability of U.S. factories to compete. We did see jobs move offshore and factories lost as a result of that. The United States also imported a ton of cheap goods and people's livelihoods increased as a result. I think a lot of people like to criticize China these days, but they also love to go to Costco. So at the end of the day, that's just a reality. But I think people are more and more questioning these trading relationships, questioning how much the United States should be integrated with China, both in everyday manufacturing goods, but particularly for technology goods. The Biden administration, the Trump administration, have introduced a lot of restrictions on technology trade with China, and that seems like something that's just going to increase in the years to come. So I don't see that as something that is going to retreat.

LINDSAY:
Okay. The two of you have put an awful lot in the table, and I want to sort of dive in and go at it hopefully systematically. And Ted, I want to pick up on this issue of the distributional consequences of trade. I went to school in the Midwest. I lived in the Midwest for a number of years, and I think if you look around much of the upper Midwest, one of the common themes you'll hear from people is that trade really hurt our communities. You had the "China Shock" and it emptied out sort of the industrial base.

What I'm curious though is to what extent is that an accurate picture of what transpired? I understand trade did have an impact, but there's awful lot of things that happened over the last three decades that we could argue also contributed to deindustrialization. And a lot of those things were domestic politics or domestic economic decisions you made: the tax code, education, not investing in infrastructure, and the like. And I'm also colored by the fact that I grew up in New England and when I was a young boy growing out, surrounded by a lot of old mill towns that had collapsed, those towns had gone through really tough times because jobs moved actually elsewhere in the United States. So help me understand, to what extent is trade really the driving factor here versus any one of another economic influences?

ALDEN:
Yeah, that's a, I mean, it's a great question, Jim, and it's one that economists debate furiously. I guess I would make it a distinction between longer-term trends and shorter-term shocks. If you look at a graph say, of the share of manufacturing in advanced economies, so how much manufacturing we see in a Germany or a Japan or the United States. Those have shrunk in a rather similar way across the last forty or fifty years, right? As developing countries grew wealthier as they became places that companies could invest, we've seen manufacturing decline all across the advanced economies. There's nothing particularly unique in the United States about that.

Your point, it's a very good one. This is not just trade, right? I mean, New England, New York, Massachusetts used to be the center of manufacturing in the U.S. A lot of that disappeared years ago to the non-union, lower wage South. So in some ways, continuing that outsourcing to a Mexico and eventually to China was a continuation of a long pattern that initially didn't really have all that much to do with trade. It was internal trade, south and north, but longer as trade opened up with places like Mexico and China, it became a trade issue.

I think the thing to keep in mind though was again, how quickly some of this happened. The "China Shock" literature is pretty compelling on this. You can say, okay, long-term there general decline in manufacturing. Obviously technology's getting more efficient, so we need fewer workers. But the scale of job loss that we saw in manufacturing in the 2000s was extraordinary. Six or seven million manufacturing jobs out of a total nineteen million disappeared in that decade. Some of that was the two recessions, early 2000s financial crisis at the end, but a fair bit of it was trade competition mostly from China.

So it's not surprising that in the public mind, the notion that trade costs good jobs, and a lot of these were good jobs. A lot of them were well-paid union jobs that really got cemented in the public mind. So I guess my slightly mealy-mouthed answer is two things are true. One is these are longer-term trends that if at all the advanced economies, but that here in the United States in particular, we did see a significant short-term impact from trade, especially with China.

LINDSAY:
And as you just note on that point, I didn't mention how technology may have undermined jobs because it takes fewer people to produce a pound of steel than it did fifty years ago, and that has ramifications. Also, the weakening of unions probably has played a role as well. Ana, one thing we haven't talked about so far is NAFTA, because NAFTA is an issue that for a long time excited a lot of people in the United States. But how it excited you depended upon where you lived. And my friends in the upper Midwest, disliked NAFTA, blamed it for contributing to the downfall of manufacturing in what we've now called the Rust Belt. But when I was living in Texas, everyone loved NAFTA because it was a source of good jobs. So help me understand how NAFTA played into all of this.

SWANSON:
Yeah, I mean, it's also been a major force, right? And I think economic studies have shown that the results of NAFTA are kind of more mixed on the whole creating maybe some jobs in the United States. But of course, the examples of those factories that are sent to Mexico are very specific and concrete and visceral. You can go to those communities, you can tell those stories whether you're a politician or a newspaper reporter. And so those really did capture people's imagination and the political reality, even though of course we did see other benefits from the increase in North American integration and in trade.

Recently, it's been really interesting to see that China has taken away some of the focus on NAFTA. Now we have this conversation about nearshoring bringing supply chains back from China to the Americas. And that trade integration with Mexico might be seen as more of a positive thing. Although with President Trump, he was recently threatening to put 100 percent, 200 percent tariffs on Mexican cars as well. So I think it's still probably a volatile issue. A lot of people still do remember that the harm that certain communities felt when factories were sent to Mexico. But it's interesting that in contrast with China now, there is more of a positive view on that economic integration with Mexico and the benefits that that can have from the American economy, too.

LINDSAY:
So Ted, let's talk about how President Trump changed the conversation when he took the oath of office in 2017. The Obama administration had a major trade initiative. It was called the Trans-Pacific Partnership. It was motivated by both economic and strategic calculations. The economic argument was lower prices will stimulate the economy. The strategic argument was that we wanted to bring together all these countries in East and Southeast Asia into a unified trading group because then we could set the standards and that would put pressure on China to have to abide by those standards.

President Trump came in, ripped that up, left the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or it is now known as the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership. He also renegotiated NAFTA, which is now known as USMCA, U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement. Though ironically, a number of the provisions in USMCA are taken straight from TPP negotiations and other negotiations as well, like revising the free trade agreement with Korea. But the significant thing is that President Trump turned to the use of tariffs.

And I'd like you just to help me understand what it was that President Trump was trying to do by resorting to tariffs. Because at times his public discussions made it sound like what he was concerned about was the trade deficit, which United been running a trade deficit importing more goods than it's exported for decades. And other times it seemed to be linked to rebuilding the American middle class, and other times he just seemed to be angry with companies because they were moving goods overseas. Help me think about how President Trump approached the debate about trade policy during his presidency.

ALDEN:
Let me get a start on this and then I'd like Ana to weigh in, because there's so much on this question. President Trump had a clear and coherent philosophy on trade. I mean, I'm sure there's people who don't particularly want to hear that because an awful lot of things in which he does not have a clear and consistent philosophy. But he believed going back to the trade competition with Japan in the 1980s, that the United States was on the losing end of these deals. He'd long been a believer in tariffs. That if we put a tax on imports that will encourage greater American production.

He hired as his U.S. trade representative, Bob Lighthizer, who is the most articulate, sophisticated defender of the idea that cutting tariffs around the world was harmful to the United States; we should put them back up and encourage domestic manufacturing. So I think that this has actually been, for all of the sort of bluster about numbers in particulars, this has been a consistent philosophy for Donald Trump. And he's not wavered particularly going back many, many years. I think what's interesting, and I'll pass it on to Ana here, is that it struck a political chord in 2016 in a way we hadn't quite seen before.

LINDSAY:
Could you talk a little bit about that, Ana, but also give us a sense of how effective Trump's tariffs were in achieving the goals that Ted just laid out?

SWANSON:
Yeah, so I definitely agree that former President Trump's tariff policy has been a strategy that has really resonated politically. And just setting their economic effects aside for a second. You've seen voters really respond to the idea that at least he is doing something to stand up against foreign nations and to protect American manufacturers. And you have seen Democrats have to reconfigure a little bit since he was in office to try to win back some of those more blue collar voters that traditionally were more part of the democratic base and unions, but have found that message from Donald Trump very appealing. And I think you could argue about are there other things than trade going on in that message? I mean, it has a lot to do with feelings about immigration too, with feelings about foreigners. Maybe some might even say xenophobia with feelings about inequality and economic opportunity. So there's kind of a lot wrapped up in that conversation about tariffs as well.

I mean, in terms of their impacts, it's been interesting. So we have seen that the tariffs on China really have started to move supply chains. The U.S. is certainly sourcing less from China as a percentage of its total imports and more from countries like Mexico and Vietnam. There's a very interesting line of research that looks at how even though these supply chains have moved out of China, though they're continuing to source a lot of inputs from China, and in some cases it's even Chinese companies that are moving out of China to other countries to continue to supply to the U.S. market. So that's been a very interesting impact as well, that these tariffs have pushed Chinese companies to go global and pushed businesses to basically just find ways around the tariffs globally.

And other tariffs have had other unintended consequences. I still speak to businesses that have kind of been forgotten about, that have had a tariff applied to them, and it's still applying many years later. There are other cases where tariffs have been suspended, but they'll be snapping back in the next year, in the next few years. Another really interesting thing that's happened is I think it's been kind of a bonanza for Washington, DC trade lawyers and lobbyists. So that's been really interesting to see that tariffs have reconfigured supply chains, but they've also led to a lot of efforts to dodge them and a lot of inefficiency, and it kind of had a mixed impact in that way.

ALDEN:
And Jim, just one other small piece on the politics, this fascinating study recently by David Autor and Gordon Hanson and various authors of the "China Shock" literature showing pretty clearly that the tariffs didn't actually help any of these communities. You're talking about there's no particular economic benefit, but it helped the Republicans politically. In those places it paid political dividends to Trump for exactly what the reason Ana was talking about, that it looks to voters like somebody is standing up to the damage that they perceive as having happened as a consequence of trade. And it has shifted the Democrat's position on this quite dramatically.

LINDSAY:
Well, let's talk about that Ted. When Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in 2020, many people expected that Joe Biden would come in and he would pursue a different kind of trade policy. But in many respects, he continued a lot of the tariffs that Donald Trump had put in place, particularly those tariffs that were on imports from China. And I should note that Trump's tariffs were not just on China. With steel and aluminum, for example, they applied to U.S. allies and friends. But sort of help me understand the logic of the Biden administration.

ALDEN:
I think there was a political and a practical logic. And in the interest of full disclosure here, we should acknowledge Jim, that you and my boss at CFR, Mike Froman had a big role in the Trans-Pacific Partnership. In a lot of ways was emblematic of a position in the Democratic Party, at least among democratic leadership, that these trade agreements were a good thing for the country. Joe Biden doesn't see it that way. Politically, he has portrayed himself, I think accurately is extremely pro-union. The unions don't like these trade deals. So his administration will be the first in many, many decades not to negotiate any significant trade expanding deals. With respect to the tariffs, you're right, the China tariffs have either been kept in place or in some cases recently actually expanded either in terms of the size of the tax or expanded to additional products.

I think the big change is with respect to other countries. Donald Trump didn't make a lot of distinction between China on the one hand, and American allies on the other. He thought everybody was ripping the United States off. The Biden administration has done a lot of work to try to rebuild economic relations with allies. Ana talked a little bit about the ideas of nearshoring and friendshoring. We need to work more closely with our partners, particularly on this next generation of technologies. So I think in terms of alliances, there's been a big shift. But the Democrats have not gone back to where they were in the Obama and Clinton, and we can go ways back administrations and essentially believing that trade liberalization was a good thing for the United States. They're now much more with the skeptic position that Trump really championed in 2016.

LINDSAY:
Ana, can I ask you to spin that out a little bit? Particularly the use by the Biden of tariffs on high technology imports. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has talked about the importance of having a small yard with high fences, but I'm left wondering how long the yard is going to stay small. I will note that the Biden administration earlier this year imposed tariffs on a range of imports of green technology or green goods from China on the grounds that if they didn't, it would overwhelm nascent American green energy technology and companies. Obviously, that comes at a cost because the Biden administration has also said it's important to have a green energy transition, and if you don't bring in the cheapest goods, it's going to make that transition take longer. So help me understand how the Biden administration is thinking about these various cross-cutting imperatives.

SWANSON:
Yeah, that's a very interesting question. So this idea of a small yard and a high fence, usually those words are used to refer to export controls. So the controls, the limits that the United States has on exporting things like advanced semiconductors and equipment to make it to China, and that just the most advanced technologies should be restricted and that trade and less advanced technologies could continue. That's kind of the principle anyway. But you're right that the Biden administration has also added tariffs on certain strategic goods from China as well. So that includes chips, electric vehicles, batteries, solar goods. And the logic there really seems to be that these are sectors where the United States is trying to build up its own factories, trying to build up its own manufacturing capacity. These are areas where the Biden administration and Congress is investing heavily through things like the CHIPS Act or the Inflation Reduction Act to build up factories.

And if these industries aren't protected by tariffs, they could just be put out of business by Chinese manufacturing as soon as they're set up. So I think it's led to this interesting situation where because of China, the United States is investing heavily in building up domestic factories. And then because of those domestic factories, the United States then needs to pursue more protective measures in the interest of tariffs. And kind of becomes this sort of cycle, which the Biden administration basically says was started by China. But yeah, it does lead to an interesting situation in which the United States to counter China needs to become more like China, right? Because China was the origin of all of this industrial policy that really built up industries to pump out exports.

LINDSAY:
I appreciate your very nice correction Ana, that what the administration did in terms of semiconductors which use export controls, not tariffs. But Ted, I want to ask you about this. When I listened to Ana, I listened to you, what I'm hearing is that all of a sudden we've all become pro-tariff. Is that a good idea?

ALDEN:
No, I mean, I think in a whole bunch of ways it's not a good idea. I mean, let's take one just in the case of clean energy goods, and I'm not arguing that United States necessarily should be entirely open to Chinese imports. The Chinese are heavily subsidizing all these sectors. We want to have our own capacity. But I was chatting with a policy guy for a big American company. I won't mention the name specifically, but they've set a target of being zero emission and all their delivery vehicles by a certain date, can't remember whether it was 2035 or whatever. Well, the fact that they can't buy the cheapest electric vehicle trucks on the market, which are made in China, makes that goal much harder to meet, right? It's going to be true for a lot of American companies that are trying to meet particular commitments to reduce emissions.

The cost of that goes up dramatically because these tariffs are being put into place. The bigger picture, I think we have to keep in mind how important trade has been in the economic gains we've seen across much of the developing world in the last twenty or twenty-five years. And if you read the reports from the World Trade Organization and others, those are slowing, and there're slowing because market opportunities in the advanced countries, including the United States, are being reduced by the tariffs that are being put in place. So there's a cost here, right? There's a net welfare cost to the world. There's a cost to consumers here in the United States. For the moment, the political judgment seems to be that those costs are worth it. But we could well be in the early stages of these tariff wars, not necessarily even in the middle or late stages. And so the cost could become much higher than what we're seeing currently.

SWANSON:
And Jim, you had asked me earlier actually about green energy goods, which is an interesting question. I didn't really respond to that. So I think it's a really interesting case because China is great at making extremely cheap solar panels, the world's most advanced, incredibly cheap solar panels, some technology that is hugely subsidized by China. But you can argue, are solar panels really a strategic good that the United States needs to be investing in and needs to be building up in? Even with huge domestic investments, U.S. solar manufacturers are still having a really hard time competing with this flood of cheap panels out of China. They're demanding more trade protections. So should the United States continue to go down that path and just adding more and more trade protections, or should we just be importing cheap Chinese panels? And it's an interesting test case because at the end of the day, there are a lot of industries that are arguing that they are strategic and essential. Textiles can be made into soldiers' uniforms, or it really raises the question of where do you draw the line?

LINDSAY:
Ted, you use a phrase that made my ears pick up. You said tariff wars. Now, I had a lot of schooling. I read about the Great Depression, read about Smoot-Hawley Tariff, and I will note that President Trump, should he win re-election, has pledged to lean heavily into tariffs. He talked about building a tariff wall around the United States. I don't know whether the numbers will be 10 percent or higher, has been talk of on some goods from China being 60 percent, maybe as high as 100 percent. Is your sense that that is something that President Trump would do if he is re-elected? And if so, what do you see as the consequences of such a decision?

ALDEN:
Oh, yeah. I think it's unquestionable that he would do it. I don't think we know the exact numbers, but I think there's no question that he would do it. And the issue is how much does it escalate? I think if we're honest, we're already in something of a tariff war. I mean, we saw Canada a month ago, put 100 percent tariffs on imported electric vehicles. The Europeans are moving to do the same. The problem is that when one country puts tariffs in place, if you've got a big producer say, at China, those exports go elsewhere. And so other countries feel forced to respond in kind. And then you've got the whole question of retaliation. I mean, China retaliated to the tariffs that were put in place under President Trump, may retaliate additionally to the new tariffs under President Biden. That has impacts. We've talked about the Midwest a couple of times.

We haven't mentioned there are a lot of farmers in the Midwest. Well, the United States is on track this year to run a $30 billion plus trade deficit in agriculture products. That's unprecedented. I mean, there are only a handful of times in the last fifty years we've ever run any sort of trade deficit in agriculture. We're a farm products powerhouse, but the tariffs in China have really hurt that market for U.S. producers. I mean, to be fair, the high dollar is also hurting, but the knock-on effects of this can become very substantial.

And if we have a President Trump, again, he's pretty clear that we're going to see new tariffs aimed not just at China, but at allies as well. I think those countries were reasonably restrained the first time around, hoping that economic relations with the United States could be repaired. I think in the Trump round two, I don't think they would be so restrained. So I think you'd see much bigger tariff responses by the countries the United States is going after. So I think we are moving, I don't know where it stops, and it's always possible to reverse, but I think we're moving more and more and more into genuine tariff war territory.

LINDSAY:
Ana, I'd like to invite you to add on to what Ted has just said, but I'd like to sort of add the following twist, which you have mentioned several times the idea of nearshoring and friendshoring. That the way you respond to, let's call it "China Shock 2.0," and also to just a strategic threat that China may pose, is by working with like-minded countries to sort of build up your own industrial capacity or to protect that industrial capacity. But that requires cooperation. And I am not so sure, given the diagnosis you and Ted laid out about American politics right now, that the American public can distinguish about tariffs vis-à-vis China versus other countries. And I'll note that one of President Biden's signature legislative achievements, the Inflation Reduction Act, left a lot of America's friends, partners, and allies on the outside looking in: the Europeans and Asian countries, most notably. And, they were quite loud about it. So how do you see this playing out?

SWANSON:
Yeah, I do think there is a notable difference in these dimensions for a President Trump versus a President Harris or a President Biden. As Ted said, President Biden has been much more focused on the multilateral aspects of restoring alliances with other countries. And you have seen some tariffs suspended or rolled back as a result of that, although many, many others left in place. And Jim, as you rightly note, there has been a lot of upset and dissatisfaction as well with preferential U.S. policies like the Inflation Reduction Act. So it's not as if the Biden administration has not ruffled any feathers, and certainly looking forward, the Harris campaign hasn't said much about what she would do, but they did say to me at one point that they were in favor of the strategic use of tariffs.

But I think there's just a very notable difference between that and what President Trump is proposing. He's proposing, he's floated a universal tariff of 10 to 20 percent, tariff on China of 60 percent or more. Making tariffs on various goods reciprocal, so just raising the U.S. tariff rate to match a foreign tariff rate. It's difficult to tell exactly where those rates would end up, but at least you can guess that there may be an order of magnitude or two larger than what a Harris administration would do. And going back to an earlier question, I do think that President Trump particularly likes tariffs. Initially, he kind of emphasized their use as a negotiating tool with other countries. They actually did prove to be a pretty effective negotiating tool with other countries. So I think he's probably kind of emboldened on that score.

Recently, he's talks a lot about their revenue raising potential. People argue about that, saying that that money is really coming from American consumers, but that's another strength from tariffs in his book. And then finally, I think tariffs are also just a very accessible tool for a president to use. That a president has a lot of legal authority to levy a tariff against an individual country when it comes to the idea of a universal tariff, people kind of question the legal authority there a little more. But in practice, President Trump found it pretty easy to levy tariffs against whomever he wanted to.

LINDSAY:
Just a technical point there I should point out, which is that the Constitution lodges the power over foreign commerce squarely with the Congress of the United States. But presidential authority doesn't rest merely on constitutional powers. It also depends upon statutory powers. And in the wake of the Great Depression, Smoot-Hawley, the Congress of the United States delegated an awful lot of authority over trade policy and tariff setting to the president. Often not realizing exactly how much authority it was giving, because the conditions and norms that surrounded the passage of those pieces of legislation have been long been forgotten. But lawyers and presidents have a lot of lawyers read those statute books very, very carefully.

ALDEN:
Jim, you may remember this, or you may have studied it, but you know the authority that President Nixon used when he put a 10 percent across the board tariff on countries in the early 1970s?

LINDSAY:
Remind me.

ALDEN:
It was the 1917 Trading with the Enemy Act.

LINDSAY:
That's right.

ALDEN:
So the fact that he could use that against countries that were all pretty much U.S. allies, it was aimed at Japan and Germany and France. Just shows you exactly your point and Ana's point about how much scope presidents have to use this tariff weapon. Congress delegated in different ways, despite the Constitution has delegated that authority away in ways that it's unlikely to reclaim.

LINDSAY:
Which is why legal challenges to what the president might do are likely going to fail in court if you ever get someone who has the proper amount of standing, because the statutes are pretty expansive that presidents, and again, not just Donald Trump or Richard Nixon have used. Just a closing question for you, Ted. On the point that Ana mentioned about using tariffs as a negotiating tool, do you see any indication that that's how a Trump administration would approach it, or is it impose tariffs and then we will respond to whatever churn that creates?

ALDEN:
I definitely want to hear what Ana has to say about this as well, because being a little more, this is a little more speculative on my part, but I think there has been a change from Trump one to where we are now. In Trump one, I think you still had the vestiges of the old notion that the goal of trade policy in particular was to expand U.S. export opportunities. And that say, China wasn't buying enough goods from the United States, and that was part of why we ran a trade deficit and we should use tariffs as leverage to get China to open up. And that, of course, was the phase one and subsequent trade agreements, which never panned out. But the notion was that China was going to buy all these goods from the United States.

It was similarly used in the NAFTA context to try to create more opportunities within what became the USMCA. When I listen to what Trump is saying in this campaign or what Bob Lighthizer has been saying in this campaign, I think they have moved much more to the notion that the priority needs to be expanding U.S. production, export opportunities actually don't matter all that much, and that tariffs are a great tool for expanding U.S. manufacturing production.

LINDSAY:
We're a large continental economy.

ALDEN:
So I think there's been a shift even from the Trump of a decade ago who was willing to use tariffs as leverage to the Trump of today, who sees tariffs. I mean, and Ana mentioned, the revenue point, who sees tariffs as beneficial in and of themselves.

LINDSAY:
Ana, you want to jump in there?

SWANSON:
Yeah, I definitely agree. I mean, I think earlier on that tariffs for President Trump were really about dealmaking, and that's how he saw himself, he branded himself. He talked a lot about that. Now, the proposed tariffs and the asks of other countries that he would make are just a whole lot bigger, but now it may be just more about even blocking foreign goods from coming into the United States versus getting a better deal. And one caveat, I guess I might say to that is there are still constituencies that I would expect him to listen to. Whether it's farmers, the finance community was really important in the U.S.-China trade deal, and there are still some advisors around him involved in that.

And maybe he will also want to contrast himself with the Biden administration, which is not really particularly stress promoting exports. They kind of left over an interesting opportunity there if President Trump wanted to kind of fashion himself as maybe an export promoter for the farming community. But yes, overall, I definitely agree with Ted's point that this is a shift more just toward a general protectionist dimension that we're seeing in President Trump's rhetoric, but then also just kind of more broadly in U.S. politics as well.

LINDSAY:
On that note, I'll close up this special election 2024 episode of The President's Inbox. My guests had been Edward Alden, senior fellow here at the Council on Foreign Relations and Ana Swanson trade reporter at the New York Times. Ted and Ana, thank you for joining me.

SWANSON:
Thanks for having.

ALDEN:
Thank you, Jim.

LINDSAY:
This special election 2024 series is supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, working to reduce political polarization through philanthropic support for education, democracy, and peace. More information at carnegie.org. If you would like to learn more about what the candidates have said about trade and foreign policy, please visit the Council's 2024 election central site. You can find it at cfr.org/election24, and election24 is one word.

Please subscribe to The President's Inbox in Apple Podcast, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you listen and leave us a review. We love the feedback. The publications mentioned in this episode and a transcript of our conversation are available on the podcast page for The President's Inbox on CFR.org. As always, opinions expressed on The President's Inbox as solely those of the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

Today's episode was produced by Ester Fang, with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.