Trump picks China critic as trade envoy

Robert Lighthizer will inherit a host of trade-related issues between the United States and India

January 03, 2017 10:36 pm | Updated 10:36 pm IST - Washington:

Old hand:  President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence during a rally in Pennsylvania in December; (inset) Robert Lighthizer.

Old hand: President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence during a rally in Pennsylvania in December; (inset) Robert Lighthizer.

A former official in the Ronald Reagan administration who believes there is no essential conflict between conservative goals and trade protectionism will be the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) in the Trump administration.

Robert Lighthizer, who was Deputy U.S. Trade Representative under President Reagan, will work with Secretary of Commerce-designate Wilbur Ross and Peter Navarro, head of the newly created White House National Trade Council, to “strengthen our manufacturing base and help stop the exodus of jobs from our shores”, a statement from the Trump transition team said.

The administration will inherit a host of trade-related issues between the U.S. and India that have been a drag on the bilateral ties. The current USTR, Michael Froman, has been extremely critical of India’s trade and intellectual property rights policies. He has also not been a supporter of India’s membership in the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation.

Mr. Trump has said he would not pursue multilateral trade agreements and would renegotiate existing ones. He prefers bilateral trade treaties with individual partners.

The statement said Mr. Lighthizer played a “major role in negotiating roughly two dozen bilateral international agreements on a variety of topics from steel to grain” under Reagan. “These agreements were uniformly tough and frequently resulted in significant reductions in the shipment of unfairly traded imports into the U.S.”

Tremendous potential

Mukesh Aghi, President of the U.S.-India Business Council, welcomed the selection. “The trade potential between India and the U.S. is tremendous and it will grow under the new administration. The USIBC looks forward to working with the new team,” Mr. Aghi said.

“Mr. Lighthizer last served in the U.S. government when trade with India was relatively minuscule. So the breadth and width of issues will be far more expansive than before. Certainly market access issues remain, particularly in sectors such as insurance, retail trade and legal services.

But now that U.S. business relations with India are deeper, the trade agenda includes more detailed issues than before — price controls, intellectual property protection, mandatory local content rules, and localised product standards,” said Richard M. Rossow, Wadhwani Chair in U.S.-India Policy Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

USTR is the U.S. lead for the U.S.-India Trade Policy Forum, a main venue to raise commercial concerns. “If this Forum is continued, Mr. Lighthizer will certainly have regular engagement with India on the complete range of commercial issues. We will also see if he is able to restart the stalled talks over a Bilateral Investment Treaty, he added.

Mr. Lighthizer had come out strongly in support for Mr. Trump’s protectionist arguments much before he announced his decision to run for President.

In a newspaper article in 2011, he wrote: “On a purely intellectual level, how does allowing China to constantly rig trade in its favour advance the core conservative goal of making markets more efficient? Markets do not run better when manufacturing shifts to China largely because of the actions of its government. Nor do they become more efficient when Chinese companies are given special privileges in global markets...”

. He argued in the same piece that Republican Presidents have historically taken measures to protect American industries while Democrats have opened them for unfair competition from abroad.

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