Lawfare Daily: Ambassador Robert Lighthizer on Trade Policy
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 23 April 2024
⏱️ 54 minutes
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Summary
Ambassador Robert Lighthizer is the former United States Trade Representative in the Trump administration and the author of the 2023 book, “No Trade Is Free: Changing Course, Taking on China, and Helping America's Workers.” He sat down with Jack Goldsmith to talk about his work as Deputy U.S. Trade Representative under President Reagan, why extreme neoliberal trade policy took hold in the 1990s, his core philosophy on trade and how it departed from the 1990s neoliberal consensus, and the main ways he implemented this view in the Trump administration and with what results. They also discussed the importance of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement and why it was controversial, the extent to which the Biden administration adopted Lighthizer’s views on free trade, and the relationship between national security and trade policy.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising. |
| 0:04.0 | To access an ad-free version of the Lawfair Podcast, |
| 0:08.0 | become a material supporter of Lawfair at Patreon.com slash Lawfair. That's Patreon.com |
| 0:16.4 | slash Lawfair. Also check out Lawfair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, lawfare no bull, and the aftermath. |
| 0:32.0 | The reality is there is no free trade. Everyone is manipulating the market. Everyone is trying to get richer for themselves. |
| 0:41.0 | That's why you have trade, quote, negotiations. You don't have trade giveaways. |
| 0:46.0 | It's the Law Fair Podcast. I'm Jack Goldsmith from Harvard Law School. |
| 0:51.0 | With Robert Lydheiser, the U.S. Trade Representative during the |
| 0:53.9 | Trump administration. It's very important that foreign policy hard power guys in the |
| 1:01.2 | national security realm spend more time thinking about economics. |
| 1:07.0 | And it's not just whether you can make bombs, it's whether you can make semiconductors and whether you can make steel. |
| 1:17.0 | Today we're talking about Ambassador Lighthizer's impactful views on trade policy that he explains in his book. |
| 1:23.7 | No trade is free, changing course, taking on China, |
| 1:27.6 | and helping America's workers. |
| 1:31.0 | Ambassador Lighthouse, you've been involved with international trade since the 1970s, I think, as a private |
| 1:37.2 | attorney on Capitol Hill, as deputy U.S. Trade Representative under President Reagan, and then as U.S. Trade Representative under President Reagan and then as U.S. Trade Representative under President |
| 1:46.4 | Trump. And you have a very distinctive and influential view of trade and trade philosophy, but before we get to that, I'd like to start off if we could in the Reagan |
| 1:56.8 | administration, which was one of the surprising things that I learned in your book. |
| 2:01.6 | If you could just tell us how free trade principles |
| 2:04.8 | were viewed in the Reagan administration |
| 2:06.8 | and what you think the significance of the administration |
| 2:09.3 | was on this |
... |
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