report on the security aspects of Washington’s economic relations with the People’s Republic. He lampooned the wildly rosy assessments of what China’s accession to the World Trade Organization would mean for the U.S. economy—and for manufacturing workers in particular. He pointed out the various policies in Beijing that distort trade, penalize foreign companies and tilt the playing ɿeld in China toward homegrown companies. He warned of industrial policies that were designed to promote the development of Chinese technology, again at the expense of foreign competitors.
Today, this is standard f are f or the policy mills in Washington; seminars and conferences abound at places like the Center for Strategic and International Studies or the Brookings Institution mulling what to do about trade with China. Remarkably, there is now widespread consensus at least around the Trump administration’s—which is to say, Lighthizer’s—diagnosis of the problem. “[It] has Tuite fairly identiɿed a series of problems in the [trading relationship] with China,” acknowledges William Reinsch, a former Clinton administration ofɿcial who’s now a senior adviser at CSIS. How to best respond is another matter.
When Trump appointed Lighthizer, the free trade purists—principally the Fortune 500 and their lobbyists, as well as powerful agriculture interests—knew they had a challenge. In their view, he’s a protectionist hack: Lighthizer worked for years as a trade lawyer at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, the prominent Wall Street law ɿrm where he represented American steel producers in a variety of cases involving unfair trade practices by foreign countries, such as dumping goods below cost in the U. S . market. Critics saw him taking the book of the old clients who made him wealthy. And since Trump is a protectionist, they argue, Lighthizer is abetting his boss’s worst instincts— and risking an ever more damaging trade conʀict between the world’s two ɿnancial powers.
The caricature mildly amuses Lighthizer, because he came to his “trade hawk” status through one of the most politically conventional paths imaginable: His ɿrst tour in government was as a staffer on the Senate Finance Committee under Bob Dole, the mild-mannered Republican fromkansas who ran against and lost to Bill Clinton in 1996. He then went to work as a deputy at
POLICY W0NKS LOVE TO DERIDE TRUMP’S “INSTINCTS” AS THE IMPULSES OF A KNOW-NOTHING PRESIDENT. LIGHTHIZER’S PRESENCE MAKES THAT MORE DIFFICULT.
the agency he now runs, the USTR, during the Reagan administration. He was recruited by—and reported to—another milquetoast moderate, former Tennessee Senator Bill Brock, and served an administration headed by one of the most pro–free trade candidates of the 20th century.
L ighthizer considers himself a “rock-ribbed Republican” who believes in free trade, he says. “Always have,” he’s said. Like Reagan, however, he is not dogmatic about it. Born and raised in Ashtabula, Ohio, he saw a vibrant steel industry, the cornerstone of the region’s economy, get decimated by offshoring in the 1970s and ’80s. Lighthizer’s willingness to deviate from Republican trade orthodoxy, he says, stems from getting “hit in the head by reality.” During his ɿrst tour at the USTR, the major trade problems came from Japan. Both formal and informal trade barriers made Japan all but impenetrable to imports. At the same time, it built competitive companies in key industries, ʀooding American markets with automobiles, steel and semiconductors. U.S. companies were getting crushed by Japanese competition back then. Dogmatic free traders seemed to think the best course was to “sit back and take it,” as Clyde Prestowformer itz, a Reagan-era Commerce Department ofɿcial, puts it. Butreagan was willing to use a powerful tool Congress had given the executive branch in 1974: the ability to bring unilateral trade action against foreign competitors thought to be unfairly injuring domestic competitors, bypassing what was then known as the General Agreement on Tariff and Trade, the forerunner to the WTO. Lighthizer was central to putting together these so-called “super 301” cases (named after the section of the 1974 trade law) against Japan. They threatened tariffs on Japanese-produced goods in order to provide relief to a range of U.S. industries, including semiconductors and satellites.
The moves in f uriated Tokyo—its trade minister at the time decried Washington’s “Maɿa tactics”—but they got Japan’s attention. In semiconductors, for example, the U.S. and Japan agreed to a series of measures that would increase over time Japan’s purchase of American-made computer chips, while also implementing a complex pricing mechanism that was intended to prevent Japanese “dumping” of chips in the