WASHINGTON (AP) — As the U.S. trade representative, Katherine Tai is legally required to avoid discussing the presidential election. But her ideas about fair trade are on the ballot in November.
Voters are essentially being asked to decide whether it is best to work with the rest of the world or threaten it. Do they favor pursuing worker protections in trade talks, as Tai has done on behalf of the Biden-Harris administration? Or should the United States jack up taxes on almost everything it imports as Donald Trump has pledged to do?
After nearly four years in her job, Tai feels she is making progress on getting the U.S. and its trade partners to focus more on workers’ rights. Decades of trade deals often prioritized keeping costs low by finding cheap labor that could, in some cases, be exploited.
“You can’t do trade policy by yourself,” Tai said in an interview with The Associated Press. “I am confident that the path that we are on is the right path to be on. I think the only question is how much progress we are able to make in these next years.”
It is an approach that has drawn criticism from business leaders, economists and Republicans who say that the U.S. has not made enough progress on new trade partnerships and countering China's rise.
“There have been no trade deals, no talks to expand free trade agreements,” Rep. Carol Miller, R-W.Va., said in an April congressional hearing with Tai. “Compared to China’s ambitious agenda, the United States is falling behind in every region in the world.”
Trump says that broad tariffs of at least 20% on all imports -– and possibly even higher on some products from China and Mexico -– would bring back American factory jobs. Most economists say they would hurt economic growth and raise inflation, though the former president has dismissed those concerns.
“If you’re a foreign country and you don’t make your product here, then you will have to pay a tariff, a fairly substantial one, which will go into our treasury, will reduce taxes,” Trump, the Republican presidential nominee this year, said at a recent rally in Erie, Pennsylvania.
Tai has degrees from Yale University and Harvard Law School, but strives for a blue-collar perspective on trade. She said that she has injected once-excluded labor union voices into the trade process.
The Biden-Harris administration has not rejected tariffs. It kept the ones on China from Trump's presidency. It has imposed a 100% tariff on Chinese electric vehicles, even though there is not much of a U.S. market for these vehicles that can cost, without tariffs, as little as $12,000. Tai sees that as a way to shield an emerging industry against subsidized and unfair competition.
But the administration also is looking to bolster U.S. workers in the face of competition from China through other industrial policies, such as funding for computer chip factories and tax breaks for technology in renewable energy sources.
The reality, according to some economists, is that domestic factories did not simply lose jobs to China. There were productivity gains that meant some manufacturers needed fewer employers and there was a broader shift as more workers moved away from manufacturing and into the services sector. Those factors often get less emphasis from Tai, said Mary Lovely, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
“It seems to me that she’s focusing on the easy one — the one where you can blame the ’bad guy,’ China,” Lovely said.
There is unfinished work.
The trade pillar of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework spearheaded by Tai remains incomplete. That effort by Washington and its allies in Asia is meant to counterbalance China’s ascendance without needing a trade deal, but it puts more of a focus on workers' rights and environmental protections than past proposals.
“What I have discovered is that we actually all want the same thing,” Tai said. “Fundamentally, what we’re doing is innovating the way you do trade policy, innovating the way globalization is going to play out into the future.”
Tai said she is trying to foster a trade policy with other countries that “allows for us to build our middle class together and to stop pitting them against each other, because that’s been the model we’ve been pursuing for the last several decades.”
William Reinsch at the Center for Strategic and International Studies said it is not surprising that Asian countries involved in the initiative would say they support their middle-class workers. But he saidt Democrats have not provided the access to U.S. markets that trade partners want in return for the focus on workers.
“The consistent message we have gotten from the Asian partners is that they are looking for tangible benefits, and the U.S. is not providing any,” he said. “Trying to rearrange the traditional social order, however meritorious that would be, can be an uphill battle.”
Tai sees herself as having a proof of concept that her approach to trade can thrive. It just happens to come from the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the revised North American trade deal signed during the Trump administration and cited by Trump as evidence that he knows how to negotiate with the rest of the world.
In her interview, Tai said the agreement includes a “rapid response mechanism” that enables the government to penalize factories that violate workers’ rights. Tai said that as of late September, the U.S. government has invoked the mechanism 28 times and concluded 25 of those efforts.
Tai said that has directly benefited 30,000 Mexican workers who could elect their own union representation, allowing them to receive higher wages, back pay and other benefits.
“We are empowering workers through trade,” she said. “And by empowering Mexico’s workers, we are ensuring that America’s workers do not have to compete with workers in our neighboring country who are being exploited and who are being deprived of rights.”
Praise for the agreement appears to be a rare point of convergence on trade between Trump and the Biden-Harris administration. But their perspectives are different. Trump tells voters that his threats of massive tariffs can cause foreign governments to accept America's terms on trade and immigration.
“I ended NAFTA, the worst trade deal ever made and replaced it with the USMCA, the best trade deal ever made," he said Monday, referring to the North America Free Trade Agreement signed by Democratic President Bill Clinton.
Tai, barred by the federal Hatch Act from weighing in on the presidential campaign from her office, is cautious in her remarks. But she disputes Trump's claim.
She notes that there were actually two negotiations on trade with Canada and Mexico. The first negotiation was among the Trump administration and the other two nations. But the second was between Trump’s team and congressional Democrats who needed to ratify the deal and that led to worker protections, a component Tai worked on when she was a congressional staffer.
But then, she added, just getting a written deal on trade protections and rights is never enough. The text needs to be backed up by action.
“They’re just words on the page unless it’s implemented,” she said.
FILE - U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai speaks with reporters in the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House, May 14, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)
FILE - U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai speaks during a media briefing at the State Department, Sept. 29, 2023, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, File)
FILE - U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai speaks with reporters in the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House, May 14, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)
An Israeli airstrike hit a mosque in central Gaza and Palestinian officials said at least 19 people were killed early Sunday. Israeli planes also lit up the skyline across the southern suburbs of Beirut, striking what the military said were Hezbollah targets.
The strike in Gaza hit a mosque where displaced people were sheltering near the main hospital in the central town of Deir al-Balah. Another four people were killed in a strike on a school sheltering displaced people near the town.
The Israeli military said both strikes targeted militants, without providing evidence.
An Associated Press journalist counted the bodies at the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital morgue. Hospital records showed that the dead from the strike on the mosque were all men, while another man was wounded.
In Beirut, the strikes reportedly targeted a building near a road leading to Lebanon’s only international airport and another formerly used by the Hezbollah-run broadcaster Al-Manar.
Israel and Hezbollah have traded fire across the Lebanon border almost daily since the day after Hamas’ cross-border attack on Oct. 7, 2023, which killed 1,200 Israelis and took 250 others hostage. Israel declared war on the Hamas militant group in the Gaza Strip in response. As the Israel-Hamas war reaches the one-year mark, nearly 42,000 Palestinians have been killed in the territory, and just over half the dead have been women and children, according to local health officials.
Nearly 2,000 people have been killed in Lebanon in the latest conflict, most of them since Sept. 23, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry.
Here is the latest:
VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis issued a new appeal for peace “on every front” is his Sunday Angelus prayer and spoke of the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas against Israel.
“Brothers and sisters, tomorrow it will be a year since the terrorist attack by Hamas against the people of Israel, to whom I renew my closeness,” the pontiff said. He called for the “immediate liberation" of the hostages still held in Gaza.
The pope called for a day of prayer and fasting on Monday, the first anniversary of the attack - which he said sparked a war that has taken a heavy toll on Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
“From that day the Middle East has fallen into worse suffering because of destructive military actions that continue to hit the Palestinian people,” the pontiff said. "It is most of all innocent civilians, they must receive the necessary humanitarian aid.”
The pope repeated his plea for “an immediate ceasefire on every front," including Lebanon.
"Let’s pray for Lebanese people, especially for the people in the south forced to leave their villages.”
TEL AVIV, Israel — Ahead of the anniversary of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, the Israeli military on Sunday displayed thousands of weapons seized from the militant group.
The military, which created the display at a sprawling army base south of Tel Aviv, said it has retrieved more than 5,000 AK-47 assault rifles from Gaza and destroyed double that number, as well as seized thousands of other items including drones, explosives, RPGs, scuba equipment, machine guns, sniper rifles, anti-tank missiles and weapons manufactured both inside Gaza and in Iran, Russia and North Korea.
The army also displayed homemade explosives it said Hamas used to burst through the border barrier on Oct. 7. It said they were crafted specifically after years of studying Israel’s border during years of Hamas-organized violent protests along the fence, including as early as 2018.
“What Hamas did on Oct. 7 was storm Israel with all their abilities at one time,” said military spokesperson Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani. He said that the Israeli military had seized the weapons from Hamas, and Hezbollah in Lebanon, to study the types of weapons used as well as track where they came from.
As Israel prepares for a day of somber memorials marking a year since the attacks, the military said it was increasing troop presence in Israel’s south to protect memorials taking place along the Gaza border.
A large memorial planned by bereaved families was expected to draw a crowd of more than 40,000 in Tel Aviv, but will be broadcast with only direct family members and media in attendance due to warnings from the military of possible rocket attacks from Lebanon.
BEIRUT — The southern suburbs of Beirut were hit by more than 30 strikes overnight, the heaviest bombardment since Sept. 23, when Israel began a significant escalation in its air campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon, Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency reported Sunday.
The targets included a gas station on the main highway leading to the Beirut airport and a warehouse for medical supplies, the agency said.
Some of the overnight strikes set off a long series of explosions, suggesting that ammunition stores may have been hit.
PARIS — French President Emmanuel Macron called for “a halt to arms exports for use in Gaza,” saying it's urgent to avoid escalating tensions in the region, his office said.
Macron drew strong criticism from Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by saying "the priority is … that we stop delivering weapons to fight in Gaza.” He made the comments in an interview with France Inter radio, which was recorded on Tuesday and aired Saturday.
France doesn’t deliver any weapons to Israel, Macron said.
Netanyahu released a video statement in which he called out the French president by name and referred to such calls as a “disgrace.”
In a statement, Macron’s office said “France is Israel’s unfailing friend. Mr. Netanyahu’s words are excessive and irrelevant to the friendship between France and Israel.”
“We must return to diplomatic solutions,” it added.
The statement also said that Macron had demonstrated his commitment to Israel's security when France mobilized its military resources in response to the Iranian attack. French authorities did not provided details about France’s role.
Macron has called for an immediate cease-fire in both Gaza and Lebanon.
DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip — An apparent Israeli airstrike early Sunday killed at least 18 people in central Gaza, Palestinian medical officials said.
The strike hit a mosque sheltering displaced people near the al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital in the town of Deir al-Balah, the hospital said in a statement.
An Associated Press journalist counted the bodies at the hospital morgue. Hospital records showed that the dead were all men. Another two men were critically wounded, the hospital said.
The Israeli military did not immediately comment about the strike on the mosque.
The latest strikes add to the mounting Palestinian death toll in Gaza, which is now nearing 42,000 according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. The ministry does not differentiate between civilian and militant deaths, but many of the dead were women and children.
BEIRUT — Powerful new explosions rocked Beirut’s southern suburbs late Saturday as Israel expanded its bombardment in Lebanon, also striking a Palestinian refugee camp deep in the north for the first time as it targeted both Hezbollah and Hamas fighters.
Thousands of people in Lebanon, including Palestinian refugees, continued to flee the widening conflict in the region, while rallies were held around the world marking the approaching anniversary of the start of the war in Gaza.
The strong explosions began near midnight after Israel’s military urged residents to evacuate areas in Beirut’s Haret Hreik and Choueifat neighborhoods. AP video showed the blasts illuminating the densely populated southern suburbs, where Hezbollah has a strong presence. They followed a day of sporadic strikes and the nearly continuous buzz of reconnaissance drones.
Israel’s military confirmed it was striking targets near Beirut and said about 30 projectiles had crossed from Lebanon into Israeli territory.
A man checks the site of an Israeli airstrike in Dahiyeh, Beirut, Lebanon, Sunday, Oct. 6, 2024. (AP Photo/Bilal Hussein)
Emergency workers inspect a building that was hit in an Israeli airstrike in Dahiyeh, Beirut, Lebanon, Sunday, Oct. 6, 2024. (AP Photo/Bilal Hussein)
Israeli soldiers pray at a staging area in northern Israel, Sunday, Oct. 6, 2024. (AP Photo/Baz Ratner)
An Israeli soldier prays at a staging area in northern Israel, Sunday, Oct. 6, 2024. (AP Photo/Baz Ratner)
People check the site of an Israeli airstrike in Dahiyeh, Beirut, Lebanon, Sunday, Oct. 6, 2024. (AP Photo/Bilal Hussein)
Smoke rises from a destroyed building at the site of an Israeli airstrike in Dahiyeh, Beirut, Lebanon, Sunday, Oct. 6, 2024. (AP Photo/Bilal Hussein)
Mourners gather around the bodies of Palestinian men who were killed in an Israeli airstrike in Deir al-Balah, Gaza, Sunday, Oct. 6, 2024. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)
