"You want to sell your stuff? You've got to meet some standards". If there ever is to be a president Elizabeth Warren in America's future, that one-liner from the Massachusetts senator, delivered at a CNN town hall on LGBTQ rights in Los Angeles this month, would perfectly sum up her vision on trade policy, writes James Politi. It's a different kind of protectionism compared with Donald Trump's - and possibly one that would cause even more disruption to America's trading partners than what is coming out of the White House today.
To be sure, there is little more than a year to go before the 2020 general election, and we don't even know if Ms Warren will be the nominee. But she has been rising in the polls over the past few months and her proposals are increasingly shaping the policy debate across the field of remaining Democratic candidates. Trade officials from around the world are judging, in real time, whether to make concessions now to Mr Trump or try to hold on until 2021, and Ms Warren's plan will give them little comfort that life will be any easier. Gone would be Mr Trump's irascible tweet-based tariff pronouncements and irrational decision-making, but Ms Warren would be throwing down the gauntlet on trade in her own distinctive manner.
The crux of her philosophy on trade is that the US should play hardball on access to its market, insisting on a series of criteria that countries would need to satisfy in order to have a preferential trade deal. The list, which Ms Warren presented in July, goes far beyond the Democratic party's traditional insistence on basic labour and environmental norms. It includes human rights, the enforcement of religious freedom, compliance with global anti-human trafficking, anti-corruption, anti-carbon emissions and anti-tax avoidance standards, the elimination of fossil fuel subsidies, and not a whiff of any suspicious currency interventions - boxes that would be hard to check unfailingly for any country, not least the US. The result would be systematic use of American economic power to force change around the world, and not just in the commercial realm.
Ms Warren's supporters will argue that this represents a much-needed adjustment to the Democratic party's thinking on trade, in tune with its leftward drift and desire for a break from the international economic policies of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Democratic critics of their two most recent presidents say they were excessively wedded to trade liberalisation and pursuing access to global markets for US companies, disregarding the fallout in America's rustbelt swing-states, which gave an opening for Donald Trump to present himself as a trade warrior for ordinary Americans.
It is telling that Ms Warren fits her trade agenda squarely within the context of her broader push for "economic patriotism" and a truly vicious critique of multinational corporations, who are most engaged in trade and investment around the world. "They have no loyalty to American workers . . . They are loyal only to their own bottom line," she said at the same event. Ms Warren's strongest point may be aspirational: if executed properly, a US bid to raise standards for commercial relations around the world would offer benefits to all, including developing nations.
But the hard-nosed policing by Washington of such a wide variety of global norms in exchange for trade with the US risks creating a huge barrier to entry into the American market. It could raise prices for consumers and extend the uncertainty for business, with limited gains for a few chosen protected domestic constituencies.
Ms Warren has not disavowed any of the more aggressive tools in the US trade law - such as reviews of national security threats from imports, known as section 232, or probes of unfair trade practices under section 301 - that Mr Trump has deployed to justify tariffs in his own confrontations with friends and foes alike.
Awkwardly, implementing Ms Warren's trade plan to the letter may create more fronts of tension between Washington and other countries, at precisely the moment the world will be looking for any signs that American leadership can be restored in the post-Trump era.
The impact of President Donald Trump's trade wars was clearly evident in September data released this week by the US Census Bureau. Goods imports and exports both dropped on a seasonally adjusted basis, compared with August 2019, and September 2018 - and this chart shows us that the slump was mostly driven by industrial supplies and capital goods.
Hiroshi Kajiyama, Japan's new trade minister
Why are they in the news?On Saturday, Kajiyama had to chair a tricky meeting of the Global Forum on Steel Excess Capacity in Tokyo. China decided that the forum was no longer necessary, since its work had been completed, bucking the consensus of other countries that wanted it to continue. In the end, Mr Kajiyama issued a chair's statement noting the dissent, but urging other countries to co-operate as much as possible with each other to fight the global steel glut.
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