Trade Rep. Katherine Tai Defends China Tariffs: U.S. Should Break ‘Addiction’ to Free Trade

United States Trade Representative (USTR) Katherine Tai is defending the nation’s tariffs on billions of dollars worth of China-made products, suggesting Washington, DC, break its “addiction” to free trade.

While U.S. tariffs on China, first imposed by former President Donald Trump, are under review but remain in place, Tai told National Public Radio (NPR) that it is clear the tariffs are warranted to protect American businesses and workers from unfair competition.

“The tariffs were ultimately imposed to redress that economic harm and to create a rebalancing in the economic relationship,” Tai said:

So now if we fast forward to today, I think that the focus really should be on whether or not we still have this challenge with China. I think it’s fairly obvious that the answer is yes. [Emphasis added]

We are looking at the tariffs in a very strategic way, and our concern is not just American national security, but also to figure out how we can break our addiction to the lowest cost, chasing of efficiency to redesign our economic policies. [Emphasis added]

In a speech before the National Press Club late last week, Tai said criticism from corporate special interest and free traders suggests that the U.S. is “not doing trade at all,” a point she challenged.

“If we look at what those [free trade] agreements did, we see the ways in which they contributed to the very problems we are now trying to address,” Tai said. “The industrial supply chain rules in our traditional free trade agreements were based on that same premise of efficiency and low cost.”

Globalization, Tai declared, is “unsustainable” for the U.S. economy.

Former USTR Robert Lighthizer, who backed Tai’s nomination to fill his role, said President Joe Biden’s administration has effectively followed the populist trade agenda first forged by the Trump administration in 2017 against a Washington, DC, consensus on free trade.

“They have literally done nothing but follow our policy,” Lighthizer told NPR. “They haven’t put any new tariffs on. They have done nothing but follow our policy, yet they criticized the way we arrived at the policy.”

Lighthizer recently published a memo for American Compass, the nationalist-populist policy think tank, where he called for the U.S. to decouple from China, but Biden has said his administration is not interested in such a move.

“America needs to begin the process of strategically decoupling our two economies, so that trade and investment are occurring only when balanced and in our interest,” Lighthizer writes. “Anyone still arguing for economic integration or partnership after all these years of evidence is unworthy of support and certainly no conservative.”

In particular, American Compass details a trade agenda for a future Republican administration which includes imposing a global tariff on all foreign imports to eliminate the nation’s booming trade deficit, barring U.S. firms from holding Chinese assets and vice versa, and rescinding U.S. normal trade relations with China.

“We transfer $300 billion of assets to China every year,” Lighthizer writes. “We are building their economy and their military. No country in human history has done this for an adversary.”

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.