President Trump said globalist politicians “ignored” for years the “abuses” of China’s trade actions that helped gut American manufacturing and have been “proven completely wrong” in regards to free trade between the United States and China.
During his address to the United Nations on Tuesday, Trump blasted globalist politicians from both political establishments for enabling China’s entering the World Trade Organization (WTO) and subsequently overlooked trade abuses.
“In 2001, China was admitted to the World Trade Organization. Our leaders then argued that this decision would compel China to liberalize its economy and strengthen protections to provide things that were unacceptable to us and for private property and for the Rule of Law,” Trump said. “Two decades later, this theory has been tested and proven completely wrong.”
“The World Trade Organization needs drastic change,” Trump continued. “The second-largest economy in the world should not be permitted to declare itself a developing country in order to game the system at others’ expense.”
“For years, these abuses were tolerated, ignored, or even encouraged,” Trump said. “Globalism exerted a religious pull over past leaders, causing them to ignore their own national interests.”
Under his administration, Trump said China is finally being confronted on the massive decades-long trade imbalance where huge tariffs have been placed on American exports to China, while Chinese goods are readily imported with little to no tariffs.
“But as far as America is concerned, those days are over,” Trump declared. “To confront these unfair practices, I placed massive tariffs on more than $500 billion worth of Chinese-made goods. Already, as a result of these tariffs, supply chains are relocating back to America and to other nations, and billions of dollars are being paid to our treasury.”
Thanks to Trump’s implementation of tariffs, China’s economic growth has slowed to its weakest pace since 1992, as Breitbart News reported, and experts say major companies are being forced to relocate outside of China.
For decades, free trade has helped gut working and middle-class U.S. jobs and stripped whole middle American towns of their industries and livelihoods. Since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed and China was allowed to enter the WTO, nearly five million American manufacturing jobs and more than 50,000 manufacturing facilities have been eliminated from the U.S. economy. This mass elimination of jobs due to free trade has coincided with an almost 600 percent increase in trade deficits.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.