How Team Trump is keeping promises on trade

Last Friday, President Trump unveiled his grand strategy for American prosperity: the 2019 Trade Policy Agenda. This forward-looking report from the US Trade Representative maps out America’s deliverance from the bad deals, weak guardrails and sluggish growth that have handicapped decades of international trade. It fulfills a key pledge made on the 2016 campaign trail: “The era of economic surrender will finally be over . . . under a Trump presidency, American workers will finally have a President to protect them and fight for them.”

On Jan. 20, 2017, the Trump administration inherited a broken global trade system in which overseas competitors and governments stole our technology, unfairly subsidized national champions and dumped their products into our markets. US multinationals responded by offshoring jobs and leaving good workers and American manufacturing strongholds in the lurch. After China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, it failed to fully abide by WTO rules and the damage grew. The US would subsequently shutter over 70,000 factories and lose millions of manufacturing jobs.

In its first two years, the Trump administration has rapidly turned this situation around.

The International Trade Commission has more than doubled its investigations of foreign subsidies harming American firms compared to President Barack Obama’s final two years. As a result of these investigations, the United States has imposed tariffs on targeted agricultural and manufactured goods to offset unfair trade practices even as President Trump has taken bold action to protect America’s steel and aluminum producers in the interests of national security.

The ongoing China negotiations likewise show that the administration’s trade strategy is highly effective in encouraging countries to address their most egregious trade practices. Under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, the United States has imposed tariffs on $250 billion worth of Chinese imports. Now the Chinese government is finally engaging in serious negotiations to address cyber intrusions into our business networks, intellectual property theft, forced technology transfer, currency practices and excessive subsidies for state-owned enterprises.