Trump's trade representative remains tough on China
WASHINGTON — In trade talks with Japan in the 1980s, Robert Lighthizer, then a top negotiator under President Ronald Reagan, earned the nickname “missile man” after he took one of Japan’s written offers, folded it into a paper airplane and flung it at the opposing side.
More than 30 years later, Lighthizer is leading the charge for President Donald Trump in a much bigger and more consequential trade fight with China, which overtook Japan as the world’s second-largest economy in 2010.
The United States and China have exchanged several volleys of tariffs this year and are at an impasse. Where the two sides go next, and how much more pain the administration is willing to exact and absorb, will depend in good part on Lighthizer’s judgment.
A veteran trade lawyer and experienced Washington hand, Lighthizer, 71, has had Trump’s ear from the start as the U.S. trade representative. But his recent success in closing an improbable deal with Canada and Mexico on a new North American Free Trade Agreement — a top campaign promise for Trump — firmly established Lighthizer as the administration’s most important voice on trade after the president.
Lighthizer shares Trump’s preference for hardball tactics and rebuilding domestic manufacturing, a conviction that for Lighthizer stems in part from his roots in the Rust Belt. He was born and raised in Ashtabula, Ohio, a onetime railroad and coal-transport town that, like Youngstown to the south, Erie, Pa., to the east and Cleveland to the west, has been pummeled by industrial decline.
“I don’t sense there’s any daylight between Lighthizer and the president,” said Alan Wolff, a Washington attorney and deputy director-general of the World Trade Organization. “The fundamental objectives have always been the same: Trade policy has to benefit the U.S. industrial base.”
That doesn’t mean Trump has a grand strategy to achieve that objective. Nor is it assured that Trump won’t settle with China for something less if it were to boost his personal stature or larger political goals. One test may come at the end of November in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where world leaders will gather for the annual Group of 20 summit. Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping could use the occasion to talk.
Because Trump has frequently spoken about his personal chemistry with Xi, some analysts wonder whether Trump could cut a modest or symbolic deal with the Chinese leader, as he did with North Korean ruler Kim Jong Un in Singapore. Administration officials have downplayed that possibility. And the fact that Lighthizer is expected to accompany Trump to Argentina makes it less likely.
Lighthizer has backed higher tariffs to exert increasing pressure on China, believing that Beijing’s industrial policies present an existential threat to America’s economic future and that Chinese officials will be more likely to make meaningful concessions if they are pressed hard enough.
In September the administration’s tariffs expanded to affect a total of about $250 billion worth of Chinese goods, half of all U.S. merchandise imports from China. Beijing has retaliated with duties on $110 billion worth of American-made products, or about 85 percent of all imports from the United States.
Even as American farmers and other businesses complain about the harm from tariffs, Lighthizer has shown no sense of urgency to meet with his Chinese counterparts. And he will almost certainly urge Trump to press for concrete structural changes in China’s economic policies when he meets with Xi, rather than accept vague commitments and promises to buy more airplanes, soybeans and other goods to shave the U.S. trade deficit with China.
“His not talking with the Chinese makes it harder for the Trump-Xi meeting to have any substance on trade,” said Derek Scissors, a China scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has advised the administration on China matters.
Scissors said Lighthizer and others in the administration want to shift supply chains and decouple America’s economic and investment links from China, a difficult process that could take many years and would undoubtedly be disruptive for both sides.
Yet that is the direction that Washington appears to be moving toward.
Ever since China opened four decades ago under leader Deng Xiaoping, U.S. administrations had largely pursued a policy of engagement with Beijing, betting that would lead to market liberalization and Western-style democratic reforms.
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