US ‘already in a trade war for decades’
washington — The United States already is in a trade war with other nations, but only now is beginning to fight back, US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said.
In a continuation of the Trump administration’s unapologetically aggressive trade policy, which views trade deficits as a national security threat, Ross said, “we’ve been in a trade war for decades, that’s why we have the deficits.”
But, “the difference is our troops are now coming to the ramparts”, he said in an interview with Bloomberg Television.
President Donald Trump has threatened to impose unilateral tariffs on goods imported from Mexico and China, criticized Germany for its surplus, pulled out the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership, and pledged to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta).
But Ross downplayed the threat of a damaging trade confrontation. “It’s not going to be a shooting war. If people know you have the big bazooka, you probably don’t have to use it,” he said.
Ross said renegotiation of the Nafta would not begin until the late in the year and hopefully will not last more than a year but noted “these are very complicated issues”. “I would like the results tomorrow, but that is not the way the world works,” he said, adding that implementing the renegotiated terms with Canada and Mexico will take some time.
The White House must give Congress 90 days notice before opening talks to revise the trade pact. Any Nafta member can withdraw from the agreement with six months notice.
Ross said that substantial negotiations to revamp the Nafta likely
It’s not going to be a shooting war. If people know you have the big bazooka, you probably don’t have to use it Wilbur Ross, US Secretary of Commerce
will not get started until the latter part of this year and could take a year to complete. He said US legal notification requirements with partners Mexico and Canada create some built-in delays to the start of substantial discussions.
“You’re talking probably the latter part of this year before the real negotiations get underway,” Ross said. The 79-year-old billionaire investor, who was sworn into his job just last week, said he hoped the renegotiations could be completed within a year, but it was unclear how long it would take to see benefits like a smaller US trade deficit with Mexico.
He said the Nafta renegotiation would be “complex”, with more than 20 chapters in the 23-yearold agreement that needed to be modernised, along with new chapters such as those covering the digital economy and other sectors that did not exist in the early 1990s. Without a US Trade Representative in office, Ross is taking the lead on trade negotiation issues in the early weeks of the Trump administration.
In Detroit last week, Mexican economy minister Ildefonso Guajardo said he was hopeful that Mexico, Canada and the US could begin discussions in June to “modernise” the Nafta, stressing that Mexico would not accept tariffs. A lessbelligerent US tone towards Mexican trade in recent weeks has lifted the Mexican peso from historic lows. — AFP/Reuters