Lighthizer Looks Back on USTR Tenure With No Regrets

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said he has no substantive regrets about the policies his office has spearheaded that have raised tariffs on products from around the world. He said the next USTR will also have to prioritize American manufacturers over inexpensive imports, and treat China as a threat. “Those things are going to endure and people will continue to make progress on them,” he said during an evening webinar Nov. 19.

Lighthizer said that in the past, trade negotiators thought if it made imports cheaper, it was a good agreement. “We’ve let economists dictate what our trade policy is and what the objective was -- efficiency in the market,” he said. “And I’m not saying that shouldn’t be an objective, but it shouldn’t be the only objective.”

Lighthizer said he has an anti-corporatist attitude, and also called himself “anti-globalist.” Lighthizer was asked by one of the University of Kansas students participating in the webinar if he's working to get tariffs on U.S. exports to Europe lifted by negotiating with the European Union. The EU recently hiked tariffs on $4 billion worth of imports from the U.S., including aircraft, liquor, and food products. “In fact, I was on the phone today, and the last couple of days with very senior people in France and in the European Commission,” he said, discussing tariffs. “Among the things we’re talking about is, there’s a long, tortured series of WTO cases involving large commercial aircraft, and we’re trying to come up with some rules on that.”

In addition to China, Lighthizer pointed to the NAFTA renegotiation and the deal with Japan, which he said would be seen as massive in any other era. (The Japan deal is not a comprehensive free trade deal). On NAFTA, he said, “If you look at the previous 11 automobile plants in North America before we started renegotiating, eight of them were built in Mexico.” He said parts suppliers also were expanding in Mexico rather than in the U.S. “Basically the United States automobile industry was moving to Mexico,” he said. “So we had to have an agreement to stop that.”