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Monday, 10 March 2008 16:01

Financial Times

Boeing is weighing a formal protest at the award of a $35bn (£17.3bn, €23bn) US air force tanker contract to EADS, the parent of Airbus. The company says that 44,000 jobs are at risk. The unions and the Democrats are furious – not least with John McCain, who helped to scuttle an earlier deal (after a corruption scandal) that would have given the business to the US company. Mr McCain had even boasted about this victory against wasteful spending, a success he may now regret. Presidential politics and fear of imports are intersecting yet again.

Last week “Naftagate” helped to defeat Barack Obama in Ohio. An adviser reassured Canadian officials that Mr Obama’s hard line on the North American Free Trade Agreement was political positioning, and that the treaty was not in danger. Hillary Clinton pilloried her opponent over this, assuring the workers of Ohio that her own trenchant opposition to Nafta was genuine. If she wins, in other words, the treaty really is in danger. In response, Mr Obama will doubtless harden his own position on trade, which will be no easy task. At this rate, both Democrats will soon be vowing to scrap Nafta altogether, and decrying mere amendment of its terms as appeasement. Delete “war on terror”; insert “war on trade”.

American anxiety over imports was trending strongly in this direction even before new figures on worsening unemployment suggested that the current economic slowdown is an outright recession. That dismal news now gets added to the mix. Until recently, gathering anti-trade sentiment in the US threatened merely to sink hopes of new trade-liberalising agreements. Now it seriously threatens, for the first time in years, to start turning back the clock. Existing trade agreements, it seems, are in peril.

In spite of his recent demagoguery on the subject, Mr Obama has broadly pro-trade views that he now feels obliged to disguise. Exactly the same is true of Mrs Clinton, who was once an enthusiastic supporter of Nafta (as she was right to be). One of the most damaging charges you can make against a US presidential candidate is that he or she is a hypocrite – but, unattractive as that trait may be, there are much worse things, and protectionism is one.

Liberal trade is a vital US interest. If a vigorous defence of that position is too much to ask at the moment, as seems to be the case on the Democratic side, a degree of restraint in undermining it surely is not. Once you have won an election, you have to govern. Stimulate protectionist appetites too much, and they will have to be fed.