Unilateral Democrats

From today’s WSJ. Notable:

Democrats claim the world hates America because President Bush has behaved like a global bully. But we don’t recall him ever ordering an ally to rewrite an existing agreement on American terms — or else.

Yet that’s exactly what both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are now promising to do to our closest neighbors, Mexico and Canada. At their Ohio debate on Tuesday, first Mrs. Clinton, followed ever so quickly by Mr. Obama, pledged to pull America out of the North American Free Trade Agreement if the two countries don’t agree to rewrite it on Yankee terms. How’s that for global “unilateralism”?

Democrats sure have come a long way from the 1990s, when Bill Clinton pushed Nafta through a Democratic Congress. And the truth is that both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama have spoken favorably about Nafta in the past. Yet now they are sounding the loudest protectionist notes by a potential President in decades. More dangerous, neither is telling the truth about the role of trade in the U.S. economy. If either one makes it to the White House, he or she will carry the weight of this campaign protectionism while trying to lead the global economy….

In the first 10 years of the deal, the U.S. economy added 18 million jobs and the jobless rate sank to record lows….

But the Illinois Senator is less than honest about his own Nafta history. In his race for his Senate seat in 2004, he told Illinois farmers that the U.S. benefits from exports under the World Trade Organization and Nafta, and he recommended that the U.S. go after more deals like it. He also discouraged protectionism, warning that “as an exporting state, Illinois would be hurt by a trade war sparked by tariffs. This would be particularly devastating to our agricultural economy.”

But that was when he was trying to appeal to farmers who rely on exports. Now that he’s battling for union endorsements, Mr. Obama says he “would immediately call the president of Mexico, the president of Canada [we presume he meant the prime minister], to try to amend Nafta, because I think that we can get labor agreements in that agreement right now.”

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