“I’m not a protectionist Democrat” – so said US Vice-President Kamala Harris at a Democratic presidential debate in 2019.
Since then, she has served under Joe Biden and, following his announcement that he was pulling out of the race for the White House later this year, she appears likely to be the Democratic nominee to face Donald Trump in November. But what shape might US trade policy take under a President Kamala Harris?
‘A complicated relationship’
The rest of that quotation, from the 2019 debate, addressed China. Harris said the US shared “a complicated relationship” with the Asian nation on trade and argued that “we have to hold China accountable”, though she offered little detail on what that could mean in practice.
She also suggested that China was making unfair use of US intellectual property, something which she said needed to be addressed:
“They steal our products, including our intellectual property. They dump substandard products into our economy. They need to be held accountable.”
‘Export American products, not jobs’
More broadly, she hinted that protecting US jobs could be involved in her approach to trade:
“My trade policy, under a Harris administration, is always going to be about saying, we need to export American products, not American jobs. And to do that, we have to have a meaningful trade policy.”
This was counterbalanced by her remarks on trade in general:
“Look: we need to sell our stuff. And that means we need to sell it to people overseas. That means we need trade policies that allow that to happen.”
Continuity?
Perhaps predictably, Harris has been a vocal critic of the trade policy of the administration prior to the one in which she currently serves – that of Donald Trump.
She stated that Trump was “erratic on trade policy”, accusing him of conducting “trade policy by tweet”.
As part of the Biden administration, however, many of the Trump-era tariffs on imports generally and Chinese-made imports specifically have remained in place.
Speaking to USA Today Money, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics Mark Zandi, as well as Oxford Economics chief US economist Ryan Sweet, suggest Harris would be likely to continue with the tariff regime brought in under Trump and sustained under Biden; Zandi said that “I think she will follow the Biden economic script closely”.
Politico, on the other hand, reports that Harris has been critical of the Trump-era tariff regime, saying at a recent rally that “theoretically, there is wiggle room there” on current US tariff policy.
USMCA opposition
Harris’s record in the US Senate on trade features one particularly notable episode: her opposition to the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA) on trade signed in 2018.
The agreement, which replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) signed in 1992, was supported by Biden and other Democrats during the Trump presidency, after its provisions were adjusted to provide better protections for workers and the environment.
However, Harris remained as one of only 10 holdouts in the Senate who opposed the agreement, citing a need for it to better address climate change issues.
Her own pronouncements in 2019 also support the idea that she would demand higher environmental standards for trade deals as president. As noted by Politico at the time, she said:
“I can tell you that in a Harris administration, there would be no trade deal that would be signed unless it protected American workers and it protected our environment.”
WTO boost?
Harris met with current World Trade Organization (WTO) director general Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala in 2021, taking the opportunity to “offer her strong support” for the WTO’s continuing work in mitigating the Covid-19 pandemic’s effects on trade, according to the White House.
During the talks, the White House added, Harris said she wanted to work with the WTO to “prioritise resilience in the global supply chain”, and that she and Okonjo-Iweala “agreed on the importance of using trade to promote equity and economic growth”.
With Okonjo-Iweala appearing likely to secure a second term in the role, a positive working relationship between the two could see more engagement from the US on trade at a time when the country is blocking new appointments to the organisation’s Appellate Body, limiting the WTO’s ability to arbitrate in trade disputes.