U.S.T.R. responds.

• Author: Mills, E. Richard
• Position: Letter to the Editor - Letter to the Editor

To the Editor:

Michael McCurry, President Clinton's press secretary, once pointed out that good facts make good spin. Jeff Frankel's article in your Spring 2004 issue ignores facts to twist President Bush's trade policy into an unrecognizable form.

President Bush fought hard--and successfully--to restore the Executive's trade negotiating authority after an eight year lapse. That Trade Promotion Authority is the cornerstone of America's credibility to deliver on trade. Moreover, the Trade Act of 2002 extended and expanded a number of preferential trade laws that had lapsed, covering some $20 billion of developing country trade.

In 2001, the Bush Administration also launched new global trade negotiations in the WTO with an ambitious mandate for agriculture, goods, and services--reversing the stain of Seattle in 1999. Within months of the Cancun breakdown late in 2003, U.S. trade diplomacy reenergized the Doha negotiations.

The Bush Administration also completed the important and unfinished work on China's and Taiwan's accession to the WTO in 2001. It has resisted the onslaught of economic isolationist efforts by Dr. Frankel's party to block trade with China.

Despite the strong economic growth of the 1990s, Dr. Frankel and his colleagues failed to initiate a free trade agreement agenda, and, as a result, the United States fell far behind the European Union and others. Talk does not substitute for action. The Bush Administration, in contrast, has acted: We now have FTAs with Jordan, Singapore, and Chile; we have completed FTAs with Australia, Morocco, five countries of Central America and the Dominican Republic, and Bahrain; we are negotiating FTAs with the five countries of the Southern African Customs Union, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Thailand. In addition to establishing state-of-the-art models--especially in cutting-edge areas such as services, intellectual property rights, regulatory transparency, anti-corruption, labor and environment enforcement--these FTAs amount to America's third largest export market. Stronger standards also give us leverage for better enforcement.

In the end, Frankel's...