Obama assailed over lack of clear trade policy

Some concede the president has been sidetracked by pressing domestic concerns.

WASHINGTON — During his first 10 months in office, as global trade contracted sharply, President Barack Obama avoided pursuing free-trade pacts and limited his public moves on the trade front to high-profile and often politically popular retaliatory actions.

Critics say he’s playing defense when he should be playing offense.

“There is no trade policy,” said Fred Bergsten, a former senior Treasury Department official and the director of the Peterson Institute of International Economics, a Washington research group.

Before Obama’s weeklong trip to Asia, which ended Thursday, the president rarely mentioned international trade. To be fair, his tumultuous first year in office has presented numerous weighty challenges, including setting a new course for two unpopular wars, overhauling health insurance and rewriting regulations for the financial world.

Still, until the Asia trip, Obama only made trade headlines when he imposed penalties on Chinese tire imports and blocked Mexican truckers from crossing the U.S. border, a restriction that Mexico says violates the 1993 North American Free Trade agreement.

Previously negotiated free-trade deals with Panama, Colombia and South Korea languish in Congress with no push from the White House. It’s all helped fuel the perception that for the first time in decades, the U.S. lacks a clear trade policy.

Since World War II, both Republican and Democratic presidents have pursued free-trade deals that opened markets for U.S. products. Obama hasn’t rejected that record, but he’s clearly hitting reboot.

His stance reflects the dominant view in his Democratic Party, whose union base often opposes trade pacts and whose liberals echo their concerns. Some 128 Democrats in the House of Representatives — about half the Democratic caucus — are co-sponsoring legislation that would require a comprehensive review of the economic impact of existing trade agreements before any new ones are entered.

In February, Obama spelled out principles that would guide him in negotiating future trade agreements, and he’s ordered a top-to-bottom review of trade policy.

Is Obama merely pausing before pursuing more trade deals?

“On trade, if you are not going forward then you are probably going backwards,” said Susan Schwab, the U.S. trade representative from 2006 to 2009 and now a professor at the University of Maryland.

The Obama administration disputes the notion that it lacks a trade policy. A senior White House official told McClatchy Newspapers that Obama’s trip to Japan, Singapore, China and South Korea was partly designed to push the region toward a regional trade pact, called the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership.

“His philosophy is that we need to be deeply engaged with Asia — economically and strategically. It’s the fastest-growing region of the world,” said the official, who accompanied Obama to Asia and requested anonymity to speak freely. “Working there to create balanced growth and open markets could potentially add billions to U.S. exports and hundreds of thousands of new jobs in the United States.”