Turning Words into Actions: Expanding Free Trade to the Middle East
Posted by Dean Kleckner
“The way forward for the Middle East is not a mystery,” said President Bush last week. “The way forward depends on serving the interests of the living, instead of settling the accounts of the past.”
And so we should be creating accounts of the future--within a U.S.-Middle East Free Trade Area by 2013, said Bush.
Fresh from removing a brutal dictator from Iraq, Bush has proposed a bold plan to pacify one of the most violent areas of the planet through the power of free trade. He has made a compelling case for bringing market dynamism to a place that comes nowhere near approaching its economic potential.
“The Arab world has a great cultural tradition, but it is largely missing out on the economic progress of our time,” said Bush, in a commencement address at the University of South Carolina. “By replacing corruption and self-dealing with free markets and fair laws, the people of the Middle East will grow in prosperity and freedom.”
Many Arab nations already play a key role in the global economy, of course. But oil exports haven’t fostered widespread prosperity. The Middle East is flush with fossil fuel, but wracked by poverty and joblessness.
There are nearly two-dozen Muslim countries in the Middle East, and yet the value of their manufactured exports comes to only about $40 billion each year. That puts them on par with Finland, according to the World Bank. The combined gross domestic product of the Arab nations is smaller than that of Spain.
Many experts believe this economic stagnation contributes to the appeal of Islamic radicalism and the problem of international terrorism.
The United States already has trade pacts with Israel and Jordan. Another one with Morocco is now being negotiated. With the Bush administration’s new commitment, there will be more trade deals coming soon. Bahrain and Egypt have been mentioned as initial beneficiaries.
Countries that sponsor terrorism, such as Libya and Syria, probably won’t sit down at the trade table anytime soon. Yet the White House doesn’t appear to be closing its doors to anybody. “This is open, ultimately, to all those countries that are prepared to participate in economic reform and liberalization,” one official told the Washington Post.
The Arab nations have nothing to lose and everything to gain from this White House initiative. Consider how much Jordan has profited from closer economic ties. In 1998, its exports to the United States totaled $16 million. That’s about how much money Jim Thome will make each of the next six years playing baseball for the Philadelphia Phillies.
Following the trade pact, however, Jordan’s exports to the United States boomed. They totaled $412 million last year, and they’ve been responsible for the creation of about 40,000 new jobs since 2000.
Many of these jobs have gone to women, and Bush spent a portion of his speech linking Arab prosperity to economic opportunity for women. As Princeton University scholar Bernard Lewis has noted, one of the reasons why the Middle East has become an economic backwater is because half of its population--i.e., the female half--doesn’t have the kind of employment opportunities that we in the West take for granted.
Building economic ties with the Middle East advances our national goals because it will improve our image in a region that too often looks upon us with envy and bitterness. We currently commit billions of dollars in foreign aid to the Middle East each year. This is a chance to replace aid with trade, and thereby contribute to the self-sufficiency of an impoverished people.
A more important and longer-term objective is to improve regional stability by replacing political hatreds with economic interests. We’d be naïve to think that free trade alone will eliminate violence; certainly the president doesn’t believe this. Yet it’s possible to hope that lowering tariffs may lessen the threat of aggression--and we’d be crazy not to give it a try.
That’s because free trade will allow us to introduce values of freedom and democracy to a part of the world that doesn’t know enough about them. In another speech from early in his term, Bush called free trade a “moral imperative” for this very reason.
It’s wonderful to see him turning these words into action--and people of good will everywhere should hope and pray that his plan succeeds.
News 
“The way forward for the Middle East is not a mystery,” said President Bush last week. “The way forward depends on serving the interests of the living, instead of settling the accounts of the past.”
