NAFTA sows discord on the right - North American Free Trade Agreement

Michael Rust

Summary: Although conservatives often view themselves as champions of free trade, a treaty going before Congress to create a North American trading bloc has divided the light. That rift may be symptomatic of a split between nationalists and internationalists.

As the North American Free Trade Agreement lurches toward Congress for a vote this fall, supporters and opponents agree on one thing -- it already has created a bull market in political fratricide.

While Ross Perot has warned that NAFTA would create a "giant sucking sound" as jobs moved to Mexico, the loudest noise so far has been from commentators and politicians arguing over the effect the treaty would have on the American economy and the environment. But some treaty opponents are looking beyond those issues: They see the proposed North American trading bloc as a threat to national security, and the dispute could be a harbinger of further rifts on the American right between nationalists and internationalists.

One of those concerned about national security is Milton Copulos, president of the National Defense Council Foundation, a think tank in Arlington, Va. Copulos thinks it's "tragic" that many of his erstwhile colleagues on the right have let down their guard to support NAFTA, which was "negotiated without consideration for defense or security implications." And the bipartisan support for the deal -- both former President Bush and President Clinton back it -- is, in Copulos's view, only another strike against it.

"It's a bad deal, put together by an elite that is driven by their own self-interest," he says. "It has nothing whatsoever to do with what's in the best interest of the American people. The people who negotiated NAFTA forgot a long time ago which flag to salute."

But NAFTA's conservative supporters return the fire of Copulos and other treaty foes such as commentator Pat Buchanan. Denouncing the accord as the product of nefarious "elites" is "an interesting development, not an interesting argument," says Wall Street Journal columnist Paul Gigot. "You're going back to the 1960s -- the new socialists are right-wing protectionists." He calls anti-NAFTA conservatives "still a rump group," which he places "in the category of the Know-Nothings."

The treaty at the heart of this controversy would phase out barriers to the free movement of goods, services and investment among the U.S., Canada and Mexico over 15 years beginning in January. At 2,000 pages, it would seem to be a bureaucrat's dream more than a politician's headache. But public uneasiness over the economy has made NAFTA an unsteady pillar of Clinton's already wobbly economic program.

Opposition to NAFTA has spawned an unlikely group of bedfellows, drawing from both the left and right. Former presidential contenders Buchanan, Perot and Jesse Jackson all have spoken out against the agreement.

"America First" advocates such as Buchanan warn of the perfidy of foreign lobbyists who want NAFTA and of the danger of surrendering national sovereignty Consumer advocate Ralph Nader issues equally dire warnings about big business; labor unions decry what they consider the downward spiral of Mexican wages; and environmentalists choke at the thought of Mexican pollution standards. Dissident libertarians argue that side agreements dealing with environmental issues give government too much power, and supporters of immigration restrictions describe nightmare visions of open, unpatrolled southern borders.

Supporters have countered with a more sanguine vision of the future if the treaty gains approval in Congress: a booming southern market for U.S. goods. They cite figures showing that since Mexico lowered trade barriers in 1986, U.S. exports there have tripled. Many NAFTA advocates also see it as a preliminary movement toward removing barriers to free trade around the world.

Copulos says he favors bilateral agreements with Mexico, but not NAFTA. He insists that anyone who thinks there is free trade "is sadly mistaken. There ain't no such animal today." What the U.S. needs to look for is "advantageous trade, because that's what everybody else does."

Copulos and other NAFTA opponents on the right see free trade as a chimera that obscures the national interest. Copulos focuses his anti-treaty arguments on two key conservative foreign policy concerns -- defense and terrorism. He believes that the defense industrial base, which provides products essential to America's military power, is threatened by the treaty. This base already has been eroded by military downsizing and will be "greatly aggravated" by NAFTA, he says. Copulos maintains that Mexico has already targeted companies in about 75 U.S. industries that it intends to lure south of the border -- including as many as 40 industries essential to national defense.

Should these industries relocate, Copulos argues, U.S. defense strategists would have to rely on Mexico's goodwill to meet production goals in a crisis. There is no guarantee that foreign suppliers would support a U.S. war effort, NAFTA opponents say. But treaty supporters argue that free trade would draw the two countries together and that lower costs would result from the relocation of industry. They also say that defense products should be available as cheaply as possible if they are vital to security. Copulos, however, worries about what he sees as Mexico's potential for political instability.

He also worries about how the use of foreign components for essential defense commodities would be reconciled with the concept of "surge" production, a major component of U.S. defense strategy "Surging" entails increasing an industry's production to the greatest extent possible without installing additional capacity. He contends that this might not be possible if large segments of industry were to move to Mexico.

Ted Galen Carpenter of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, doubts that NAFTA would have an "adverse effect on highly sophisticated defense firms." The prospect of high-tech companies going south is "highly improbable overall, given the level of Mexican education and work standards," he says. In fact, Cato President William Niskanen says, the treaty would aid the defense conversion process by improving the economy and so increasing demand for skilled labor in the United States.

But Copulos paints a different picture, noting that two specialty forging companies are leaving Michigan for Mexico. Specialty forgings include turbine blades for jet engines and parts for tanks and aircraft; "a very, substantial portion" is directly related to defense. He concedes that many companies would head south regardless of NAFTA, but says that the treaty would "greatly accelerate that movement" and leave industry believing that relocation is the best option for dealing with increased competition.

Gigot of the Wall Street Journal disputes this. Arguments over the treaty are largely based on wage differences, he says, and the defense industry relies on sophisticated research skills. "Is Lockheed really going to make cruise missiles in Guadalajara?" he asks. "I doubt it."

But Michael Lind, executive editor of the National Interest, a foreign policy quarterly, disagrees. High-tech jobs are vulnerable, he says. "Even highly skilled jobs are now being expatriated. American computer companies are now hiring programmers in foreign countries."

Lind's nightmare is that "five years down the line the great leader will come along and say, |You will work for the state,' and they will have had the best training in the world."

Carpenter of the Cato Institute concedes that this is "a remote possibility." But "this kind of computer software technology is hard to maintain as a national secret. NAFTA won't have much effect one way or another."

Concerns about the industrial base shouldn't frighten conservatives away from free trade, because the U.S. can produce what it needs to maintain military strength under a free trade regime, says Gregory Fossedal of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, a think tank in Arlington, Va. Fossedal says he respects many of the conservatives who oppose NAFTA, but their arguments remind him "of the awkwardness I felt when some conservatives argued that defense spending was good because it provided jobs."

If industrial bases seem like a dry topic, not so with the threat of terrorism, which became all too vivid to Americans in February with the attack on New York's World Trade Center. Ratification of NAFTA would be a "bonanza" for terrorism, says Copulos. Reduced border patrols would simplify the already not-difficult problem of entry into the U.S.

George Washington University sociologist Amitai Etzioni has written that "able-bodied spies and terrorists may cross the Rio Grande at least with the same ease as maids seeking household work in the north." NAFTA critics argue that even now, less than 10 percent of vehicles crossing the border are inspected and that the situation would grow worse if the treaty takes effect.

So, too, with illegal narcotics -- "really the Achilles' heel of NAFTA," says Copulos. He cites the estimate of William von Raab, a former customs commissioner, that as much as 70 percent of illegal narcotics smuggled into this country come across the Mexican border. Critics believe that NAFTA, once fully implemented, would give drug kingpins increased opportunities to move drugs north, since Mexican trucking firms would have free access to all of North America.

"That is hilarious as an argument," says Gigot. "NAFTA is about tariffs and goods," not regulating or stemming the flow of people, who are going to keep on coming no matter what treaties are signed.

Cato's Carpenter says terrorism is "another red herring being pulled across NAFTA's path." Drugs will move across the border "with or without NAFTA," he says. And libertarian writer James Bovard has argued that, since the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Customs Service intercept only about 10 percent of incoming narcotics, "it is hard to believe that NAFTA could make the drug trade much worse."

As for immigration, supporters contend that NAFTA would actually decrease it by raising the Mexican standard of living. But Copulos is skeptical. In nonindustrialized countries such as Mexico, where there's "a fairly high level of barter" in the economy, "money wages take on a disproportionate value," he says. Arguing that ordinary Mexicans are desperate, Copulos says the minimum wage there is barely enough to feed one person -- "essentially starvation wages" -- and the average Mexican family consists of five people. Mexicans "are going to look elsewhere, and nothing that's going to happen under NAFTA will change that."

The heretical notion that capitalism won't help alleviate this situation astonishes some conservatives. "We believe in free trade," says James Courter, a former New Jersey congressman and now chairman of the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission. "We believe in reduced barriers. We believe in immigration. We believe in the fact that immigrants have been one of the greatest natural resources we have in this country. So it's very discouraging to me to see the number of conservatives who are well-known advocating isolationism."

But Copulos says he's discouraged that some conservatives who "would bridle if they were approached by a hostile foreign power to take some act that would undermine the country's national security in a military sense" will "willingly sell themselves on the altar of greater profits to foreign powers whose economic actions have consequences that are just as severe."

Regardless of who prevails in the NAFTA dispute, the warfare over issues of sovereignty and nationalism is more evidence of the divisions within American conservatism. Historian Eugene Genovese has suggested that the traditional left/right dichotomy is being transformed into a split between populist nationalists on one side and free market internationalists on the other.

"If you put Bush and Clinton in a bag, shook them up and dumped them out, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference -- which I find disconcerting," says Copulos. The only question left for voters is whether they want Republican or Democratic internationalists leading the way, he says.

This sort of rhetoric is "an attempt to be populist," says Courter. "It's anathema -- and in my mind, totally inconsistent -- to true conservative views and the conservative approach toward democratic capitalism." NAFTA opponents "may be playing to the crowd," he suggests.

Both sides can look to history for justification. For most of its history, the GOP was the party of tariffs and protectionism, while the Democrats from the time of Andrew Jackson until well into the 20th century were fervent free traders, says Jeffrey Bell, author of Populism and Elitism. If GOP protectionists can see continuity with Republicans of the past, they shouldn't claim the mantle of populism, cautions Bell. "Historically, the populist party was always the free trade party," both in the U.S. and Great Britain. "The populist position was to be for the consumers."

But Copulos says, "The simple fact is, we're in a very, very different world than we were just a few years ago. The U.S. is the last remaining superpower. We have many problems at home that we need to address which we kind of put on the back burner until such time as we settled the Cold War, which we've done. But now is the time to start looking inwards."

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