Trade tops Obama’s Vietnam list
WASHINGTON — When Republican Donald Trump complains about unfair trade partners, he often singles out Vietnam — “hot as a pistol right now” and “the new one just killing us.”
And when Democrat Bernie Sanders warns about the perils of global trade deals, he rarely misses a chance to say Americans shouldn’t have to compete against Vietnamese workers earning 65 cents an hour.
But when President Barack Obama talks up the benefits of new trade deals, he holds out commerce with Vietnam as an example of the potential benefits of globalization.
Those complex politics of trade — casting Vietnam as trading bad-boy or target of opportunity — will be in the spotlight next week as Obama visits Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City to push a trans-Pacific trade deal that would cover nearly 40 percent of the global economy.
Vietnam is the first stop on a weeklong Obama trip designed to showcase the president’s commitment to the Asia-Pacific region and to strengthen ties to fast-growing Asian economies in what Obama says is “an age of global supply chains, and cargo ships that crisscross oceans, and online commerce that can render borders obsolete.”
The president’s overarching message about trade — embracing rather than fearing globalization — will be competing against counter-programming in the 2016 presidential campaign to select his successor. Trump’s denunciations of “stupid” U.S. trade deals that hurt U.S. workers have been a big selling point in his successful march to the brink of the GOP presidential nomination.
Sanders and Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton also oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership, although Sanders is far more vocal about it than Clinton. Sanders argues that international trade deals are set up to benefit corporate America at the expense of U.S. workers “forced to compete against people in Vietnam today making a minimum wage of 65 cents an hour.”
Deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes, taking note of the heated trade debate in the presidential race, says many other countries, too, are “wrestling with reactions to globalization and fears of further globalization.”
The administration’s goal — and challenge — is to put those fears to rest by arguing that negotiators learned from the weaknesses in past trade deals and worked to make this one more robust in promoting high standards in labor, the environment and more, Rhodes says.
Vietnam, meanwhile, has been seen as a rising star among developing Asian nations, albeit with hiccups, offering huge potential for U.S. markets. The Vietnamese government forecasts its economy will grow between 6.5 percent and 7 percent a year for the next five years.
The Obama administration sees big potential in what is now a lopsided trading picture: U.S. imports from Vietnam totaled nearly $38 billion in 2015, compared to U.S. exports to Vietnam of $7 billion.
While Sanders argues against sacrificing U.S. jobs to low-wage workers in Vietnam and elsewhere, the Obama administration stresses provisions of the trade deal that would allow U.S. business and workers to compete more evenly with those in other nations. Vietnam has adopted some laws to improve legal protections for citizens and has agreed to allow independent labor unions, currently forbidden, under a labor agreement that takes effect once the Trans-Pacific Partnership is ratified.