Trump’s credible threats will work
A tough stance on trade will ensure that NM thrives along with the rest of the U.S.
Although I believe strongly in free trade, my beliefs are balanced with having learned the lesson of strategic deterrence at an early age. Strategic deterrence is use of credible threats by one party to convince another party either to refrain from initiating some course of action or to cease a course of action. Both my parents were intelligence officers involved with our strategic nuclear arsenal in the 1960s, and strategic deterrence was a frequent dinner table discussion as I was growing up. Today, President Trump’s tough stance on NAFTA, North Korea and China clearly demonstrates the use of credible threats.
In National Economic Council Director Lawrence Kudlow’s Fox News Sunday interview last month, it seemed clear that the notion of strategic deterrence is driving the Trump administration’s trade policy towards China. While both Kudlow and President Trump are free traders, Kudlow correctly noted that “you can’t have free trade, which is pro-growth around the world, unless China brings down its barriers, opens up its markets and stops this technology stealing that they’re doing.”
President Trump’s America-First posture will benefit all Americans, particularly innovators, job creators and energy producers in here New Mexico. This same concept of a credible threat is true in our dealings with Mexico, as NAFTA needs to be renegotiated to better advance American interests. While I agree with the administration that blanket tariff hikes are “prosperity killers,” so are some of the anti-American elements of NAFTA.
As the Heritage Foundation notes, energy exports to Mexico are virtually prohibited because a government monopoly known as Pemex controls their market. Advanced fracking technology extracts oil from deep wells in New Mexico, but because NAFTA does not permit natural gas exports into Mexico, most producers have to flare off the resulting gas.
Naturally, leftist economist Paul Krugman of the New York Times argues against requiring our trading partners to follow the rules based on an assumption that we are already at full employment. That assumption is easy for the bi-coastal elites to assume because the poor and unemployed cannot afford to live in most of San Francisco or Manhattan. The reality of the America that they repeatedly ignore is one of the primary reasons they received a proverbial two-by-four to the head when President Trump trounced their liberal ideology in Middle America.
Here in New Mexico, we are definitely not at full employment and we have large chunks of the population who have simply given up looking for work, a segment of the population that the left continuously ignores when it tries to downplay the devastating fecklessness of the Obama non-recovery. N.M.’s labor force participation rate in 2015 was 58.4 percent, 4.7 percent below the national average. Our rate was lower than all our neighboring states and below nearly every other state in the country. While President Trump’s economic policies and tax cuts are helping New Mexico and America become great again, historic Democrat obstruction in Congress is blocking the further reforms we need to achieve an era of sustained rural prosperity and permanent manufacturing gains.
At the state level, decades of Democrat incompetence in Santa Fe — coupled with the lack of a rightto-work statute — often mean companies refuse to consider relocating to New Mexico. Recent attempts by Sandoval, Otero and Lincoln counties to implement right-to-work ordinances, however, give hope to residents of those counties.
Along with the economic benefits, a healthy manufacturing sector — particularly steel and aluminum production — is vital to our national security. Renegotiating NAFTA to ensure the primacy of American interests is vital to New Mexico’s economy. I also applaud the Department of the Interior’s efforts earlier this year to roll back Obama-era regulations that harm industries that produce and use “minerals considered critical to the economic and national security of the United States.” At least 11 of the identified critical minerals are found in extractable quantities right here in New Mexico’s 2nd Congressional District: aluminum, beryllium, helium, manganese, potash, rare earth elements group, tin, tellurium, tungsten, uranium and vanadium.
President Trump’s stance on trade is good for America and good for New Mexico. He not only needs members of Congress who support his policies, he needs intellectual allies who can both appreciate and articulate his approach. With my academic background and quarter-century of experience in rural and tribal economic development, I fully support President Trump’s America-First trade initiatives.