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player ready...The vote on NAFTA next week is one of those classic votes, like the Panama Canal Treaty, where the issue is one part reality, nine parts symbolism. Despite the dueling job numbers deployed on both sides of the issue, the net economic effect of NAFTA on the United States will be minimal.
It must be so. The Mexican economy is 1/20th the size of America’s. Jobs will be lost and jobs will be gained; more, undoubtedly, gained than lost. But in the great churning of a capitalist economy the size of ours, more jobs are gained and lost with the rising of the sun than with NAFTA.
Then what is NAFTA about? It is about America’s vision of itself, of its relationship with its neighbors, and particularly with the developing world. Wednesday’s NAFTA vote is not about economics. It is about foreign policy.
This is what makes liberal hypocrisy on this issue unusually noteworthy. A majority of congressional Republicans are going to cross partisan lines and support a Democratic president on NAFTA. The majority of House Democrats will not. Those poised to kill NAFTA are traditional Democratic liberals.
Why is this hypocrisy? Because in the great foreign policy debates of the ’70s and ’80s, liberals had two articles of faith: 1) that the root cause of instability, revolution and anti-Americanism abroad was not communism but poverty and privation, hunger and injustice. And 2) that therefore the primary U.S. response to such ought to be not military but economic.
When on April 27, 1983, Ronald Reagan went before a joint session of Congress to ask for military aid to El Salvador, the Democrats protested. We are addressing the wrong problem, they said. They gave the quintessential liberal analysis of trouble in the Third World: “If Central America were not wracked with poverty, there would be no revolution.” In the liberal view, the way to turn enemies into friends and secure American interests was not with military but with economic measures to fight poverty and underdevelopment, the “root causes” of Central America’s troubles.
A generation of experience has taught us that while the Peace Corps and foreign aid are noble gestures, by far the best way of promoting development and erasing poverty abroad is trade. The great economic transformation of the Pacific Rim countries (Japan, Korea, Taiwan) owes much to the farsighted American view that opening our markets to them would be a boon not just to American consumers but to Asian peasants.
What is killing newly free Poland, on the other hand, is the meanness of the West Europeans who have shut Poland out of their markets. Mexico is the next obvious case. By integrating Mexico into the American economic system, NAFTA would assure Mexican development. Here finally is the opportunity to do for Mexico what liberals have been saying for decades we should do for developing countries: prevent instability and hostility by fostering peaceful economic development.
One would expect resistance to this idea from populists like Perot and primitives like Buchanan. But from liberals? Liberals who for decades have been advocating just this kind of assistance to poor countries both as a moral obligation and as a national interest? (It is to the credit of Sen. Chris Dodd, the man who delivered the official Democratic response to Reagan 10 years ago, that while his party is poised to kill NAFTA, he stuck to his principles and supports it.)
Finally, a chance to deliver on the most basic liberal foreign policy premise. And to do it not in far-off Poland, or even El Salvador-but on our border, the one place where deprivation and despair immediately spill over into the United States.
Yet most congressional Democrats have lined up opposed, having entirely forgotten two decades of pious sermons about American purposes abroad. And on the 30th anniversary, no less, of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, founder of the Peace Corps, patron saint of this liberal vision of enlightened internationalism.