OPINION:
China recently complained to the World Trade Organization about President Trump’s new tariffs, and although U.S. officials at the WTO agreed last week to meet with their Chinese counterparts, the meeting will not accomplish anything.
The WTO is a global organization of member companies working together to ensure fair and reciprocal trade — at least that is how U.S. leaders sold it to the American public 30 years ago. Instead, it has become a globalist bureaucracy forcing the U.S. to abide by rulings from an unaccountable dispute resolution system that routinely favors China and other bad actors.
The WTO has been on life support for nearly a decade, and it was Mr. Trump who put it there. By blocking the appointments of judges to the Supreme Appellate Body during his first term, Mr. Trump robbed the WTO of its ability to issue rulings in trade disputes, a policy President Biden wisely continued.
The only question now is why the U.S. keeps sending delegations to these mostly useless WTO meetings and how long we will continue to do so.
It’s worth considering how we got here. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Democrats and Republicans supported the WTO, which was supposed to create a peaceful and prosperous world by demolishing global trade barriers. Presidents Clinton and Bush worked to secure full membership for China.
The only people who opposed the WTO were union hard-liners and literal anarchists, who started riots outside the group’s 1999 conference in Seattle. The only dissenting voice on the right was the ever-prescient Patrick Buchanan.
That all changed when the China shock hit. American consumers gained access to many cheap goods, but according to one estimate, these trinkets cost 3.4 million manufacturing jobs. Entire regions of the country have never recovered.
As free trade zealots insist, this is not solely the result of cheap Chinese labor. The truth is that the People’s Republic of China has no interest in either free trade or fair competition.
The FBI estimates that Chinese intellectual property theft, software pirating and counterfeit goods cost the U.S. economy up to $600 billion annually. China also engages in flagrant currency manipulation to gain an edge in international trade.
China spends hundreds of billions of dollars subsidizing its companies. Huawei controls 30% of the global 5G equipment market, thanks partly to around $75 billion in state support. American firms are doing their best to compete. Cisco has a market share of around 5%, and telecom companies HPE and Juniper Networks are in the midst of an acquisition deal that would give them a larger presence on the global stage once Attorney General Pam Bondi removes the Justice Department’s hold on the merger. Still, it’s hard to make gains on an unlevel playing field.
Since joining the WTO in 2001, China has hidden behind its self-designation as a “developing country,” which allows it to engage in more protectionism than other members. This special status is meant to help poor, vulnerable countries transition to free trade, but China, the world’s second-largest economy, refuses to make that transition.
“China’s record of compliance with the terms of its WTO membership has been poor,” the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative concluded in 2020. “China has continued to embrace a state-led, non-market and mercantilist approach to the economy and trade, despite WTO members’ expectations and China’s representations that China would transform its economy and pursue the open, market-oriented policies endorsed by the WTO.”
You don’t have a free trade bloc when the biggest exporter in your free trade bloc is an incorrigible cheater with a state-run economy. Politicians from both parties spent decades in denial while the WTO wrecked America’s industrial base and let China get away with murder. It took an outsider like Mr. Trump to finally speak the truth.
Because it’s nearly impossible to expel a WTO member nation, Mr. Trump had only one option to fix global trade: Jam a wrench in the dispute resolution process until it stopped moving.
Now that Mr. Trump is back in the Oval Office, he could make another move to signal America’s new economic nationalism.
The U.S. is the largest contributor to the WHO, providing around 11% of its 2023 budget. In dollars, that comes to a paltry $26 million. Still, we shouldn’t be spending a penny on a globalist body that is, at best, useless and, at worst, actively harmful to American interests.
Mr. Trump has already unleashed the Department of Government Efficiency on wasteful international spending at the U.S. Agency for International Development and moved to withdraw the U.S. from the corrupt World Health Organization. It’s time to put the WTO on the chopping block as well.
• Corey R. Lewandowski was a senior adviser to the Donald J. Trump presidential campaign in 2024 and 2020 and campaign manager during the 2016 campaign.
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