The White House Steel Trap

The White House Steel Trap


Published: November 11, 2003

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To no one's surprise, the World Trade Organization issued a final ruling yesterday that the Bush administration violated trade laws when it slapped onerous tariffs on an array of steel imports last year. The tariffs, as harmful to the American economy as they were to foreign exporters, were a political gambit, aimed at scoring points in such key electoral battlegrounds as Pennsylvania.
The W.T.O. ruled against the tariffs last July, rightly finding that Washington had failed to make its case for the "safeguard" action. The Bush administration could not prove that an unexpected surge of imports had hurt the American steel industry. It did not help that the industry had been suffering from self-inflicted woes for years and that imports were actually declining in the immediate two years before the tariffs. Yesterday's ruling was against the appeal of that judgment. The Bush economic team reportedly opposed the tariffs from the start — as had the Clinton administration — but was overruled by White House political operatives.
The European Union, Japan, Brazil and others will now be free to retaliate against American imports if the administration does not lift the tariffs. The European Union is compiling a list of tariff-worthy goods — from Harley-Davidson motorcycles to farm equipment and Florida citrus juices — that would maximize the punitive bang, politically speaking, for the buck.
President Bush should cut his losses, abide by the W.T.O. decision and lift the tariffs, even if it means angering the very steel workers he set out to woo. Continued defiance would be disastrously timed. Frayed trade relations have already jeopardized important efforts to liberalize global trade.
Despite being a Republican ostensibly committed to free markets, Mr. Bush has abdicated America's leadership role in championing them. The same set of muddled calculations that led to the steel tariffs last year prompted Mr. Bush to sign an outrageously protectionist farm bill.
Congressional Democrats' complaints about the W.T.O. decision will only make matters worse. What the world will read into Washington's bipartisan protectionist rant is the unwillingness of a bully to abide by the rules it expects others to follow.

Will our resident cowboy be forced to back down or will he in his usual stupor ignore the rest of the world? Further degrading our standing among the nations of the world. And further down the path from shining light among nations to ogre.