Focused Read in 3 minutes,
a bit more if you choose to go deeper into the story
Peter Navarro is pictured here at the microphone in the middle of Donald Trump, Wilbur Ross and Mike Pence
“After Defeating Cohn,
Trump’s Trade Warrior Is on the Rise Again"
Key words: Trade Nationalist, Buy American, Hire American, Military Readiness
"(By Peter Coy)
President Donald Trump’s
nationalist trade adviser Peter Navarro has staged a startling
comeback.
Last year he nearly
disappeared from view when his small operation was subsumed under the
White House’s National Economic Council, which was headed by his
rival, Gary Cohn, the free-trader who was president of Goldman Sachs.
Now, Cohn’s on his way out while the steel and aluminum tariffs
that Navarro advocates are on the verge of becoming national policy.
... One factor behind
Navarro’s surprising resurrection is that Trump has taken renewed
interest this year in trade and national security -- Navarro’s
issues -- after having focused in 2017 on health care and tax cuts.
The second factor is that Navarro is as relentless as a honey badger.
He’s been in front of television cameras repeatedly over the past
week championing the tariffs. Trump signed an order establishing the
tariffs on Thursday.
After losing to Cohn in
the White House turf wars, someone else might have packed up and gone
home to California. Instead, Navarro kept working the issues and
building the case for stronger action. Even now he’s not letting
up, according to Michael Wessel, a steelworkers representative who
speaks with him regularly.
... Free-traders are elbowing
each other aside to express their dismay about Navarro’s ascendancy
-- and Navarro welcomes their disdain.
Although he holds a Ph.D. in
economics from Harvard and taught the subject at the University of
California-Irvine Paul Merage School of Business,
Navarro accuses his
fellow economists of blindly adhering to free-trade principles at the
expense of national security.
(Emphasis is mine.)
... His closest
administration ally is Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, a fellow trade
nationalist.
(Emphasis is mine.)
... Most important, both
Navarro and Trump are former Democrats who feel no compunction to
stick to Republican orthodoxy on trade.
Accurate Intuition
Speaking to Bloomberg on
March 7, Navarro heaped praise on his boss and described his own role
as that of an enabler.
“This is the president’s
vision.
My function, really, as an economist is to try to provide the
underlying analytics that confirm his intuition.
And his intuition is
always right in these matters,” Navarro said.
... Navarro got off to a strong start last year when Trump
pulled the U.S. out of negotiations on the 12-nation Trans-Pacific
Partnership trade deal, one of his first acts in office.
Navarro also
spearheaded the president’s “Buy American, Hire American”
initiative, which tightens enforcement of federal procurement rules
and cracks down on alleged abuse of H-1B visas and other
foreign-hiring programs.
(Emphasis is mine.)
In April, Trump called Navarro “one of the
greats at trying to protect our jobs.”
Fading Star
Then Navarro started to
fade from view.
... But Navarro never stopped
pushing his agenda,
which intertwines economics and military
readiness and puts China at the heart of U.S. policy.
(Emphasis is mine.)
He pressed the
Pentagon to seek increased funding for Abrams tanks and Bradley
Fighting Vehicles, in part to keep open the factories in Ohio and
Pennsylvania that make them...
He also argued
successfully for the Pentagon to seek funding for another Littoral
Combat Ship, again to keep the shipyards where they’re made afloat.
And...Navarro was behind Trump’s executive
order requiring a broad review of the nation’s defense industrial
base. It’s due in April.
(Emphasis is mine.)
Long Way
Navarro has come a long
way from his roots as a mainstream economist. He supported free trade
in a 1984 book, “The Policy Game: How Special Interests and
Ideologues Are Stealing America,’’ arguing that tariffs
“protected the profits of a small core of domestic industries”
while harming consumers. (He explains that because “the globalist
erosion of the American economy” was just getting started, he
hadn’t recognized it then.)
By 1993...Nafta, as “Shafta.” By the 2000s, China was on his
radar.
He concluded that it owed
its success to unfair trading practices.
In 2006 he published “The
Coming China Wars: Where They Will Be Fought, How They Will Be Won.’’
In 2011 he wrote “Death by China: Confronting the Dragon -- A
Global Call to Action’’ (co-authored with Greg Autry), which
argued that the U.S. and China are on a trajectory for armed
conflict.
(Emphasis is mine.)
Out of Nowhere
Navarro essentially barged
into the China-watcher community without an invitation.
“Navarro is
not known in any China circles,” James McGregor, a former chairman
of the American Chamber of Commerce in China, told Foreign Policy
magazine last year.
But it was “Death by
China’’ that caught Trump’s attention.
Trump provided a blurb
for a 2012 documentary film based on the book: “Right on. ... I
urge you to see it.” The trailer features a knife, representing
China, that’s plunged into a red, white, and blue map of the U.S.
Blood leaks from the tricolor corpse.
... Plenty of observers
wouldn’t agree...that Navarro is correct on China, or much
of anything else. That’s unlikely to bother someone who’s
followed a convoluted path to power, and who revels in his outsider
role: the economist and self-made China expert who’s regarded with
suspicion by other economists and China experts. And in Trump’s
White House, none of that hurts him a bit."
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g. (Unapologetic Democrat)
g. (Unapologetic Democrat)
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g., aka Focused Democrat
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