Joe Biden will have to manage both the populist right and the protectionist left, say

Charles Hankla.

ATLANTA, Georgia:09/Dec/2020

Since becoming president-elect, Joe Biden has signaled that restoring America’s leadership on the world stage is among his highest priorities – an intention aptly demonstrated by his Cabinet picks.

Biden’s nominees are “ready to lead the world, not retreat from it,” he said on Nov 24. “America is back”.

Perhaps nowhere is this return more urgent than in trade policy. Over the past four years, President Donald Trump has ripped up trade deals, launched damaging trade wars and gummed up the workings of international trade organizations’.

All of this has ceded global economic leadership to China, as we can see from the trade negotiations Beijing recently inked with many other Asian nations.

In November, the countries formally signed what is now the world’s largest regional free trade pact, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, covering nearly a third of humanity.

Biden no doubt longs to return to some semblance of the “golden era” of US leadership, the half-century following World War II when America helped create and sustain the rules and institutions that fueled globalization.

But after four years of Trump’s “retreat,” it may be harder to return to leading than Biden thinks – thanks to the growing number of Americans on both the right and the left skeptical of free trade.

While Trump advocated a trade policy he labeled “America first,” it’s probably not the best description.

The policy has involved applying punitive tariffs on specific products such as steel and aluminum and on whole countries – most notably China – at a scale not seen in decades. But the price to the US has been high.