Rejoin the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Dropping out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement might have been the Trump Administration’s biggest trade policy mistake. The TPP was already negotiated and would have strengthened an alliance against China, including most of its biggest trading partners in East Asia and the Americas. America’s departure created tensions and infighting, distracting the U.S. and its allies from the goal at hand: countering China. The other 11 TPP countries continue, without American input or influence, under the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPATPP) to develop a modern institutional framework to contain Chinese commercial imperialism. countries are mostly China’s neighbors in Asia. Like the TPP, it seeks to create an alliance to push China toward the rule of law, but the Biden Administration so far has left trade entirely out of the agreement. Instead, the IPEF negotiations are focusing entirely on non-trade issues like climate and labor policy—issues that give progressives opportunities to impose their policies on other countries and provide rent-seeking opportunities for labor unions and politically connected businesses in renewable energy and other favored industries.

IPEF has the potential to be a powerful diplomatic tool that helps to bring countries into America’s orbit and away from China’s. Beijing’s chauvinistic approach to foreign policy has alienated most of China’s neighbors and allies. They follow along because they lack alternatives. IPEF and the TPP could offer them a way out and make it easier for China’s smaller neighbors to stand up for themselves in a united front as they move toward American- style institutions that protect civil, political, and economic liberties.

IPEF could do all that, and so could the TPP, but America currently has no voice in the TPP, and IPEF risks becoming little more than another tool that progressives can use to force their policy wish list on countries that don’t want it. From the perspective of IPEF’s members, the Biden Administration’s approach is little different from Beijing’s. The next Administration can give China’s neighbors a better choice by refocusing IPEF on trade, dropping most of its non-trade issues, and turning it into a forum to promote democracy and strengthen alliances while pressuring Beijing to make needed reforms.

Play the long game. It took two generations to win the Cold War, and there were many reasons for that success. The fact that the planned economy is inherently inferior to free-market capitalism played a role. So did diplomatic, military, and economic pressure from free countries. But culture was just as important, and it did not come from any government. Blue jeans and rock ’n’ roll helped to win the Cold War as much as any deliberate policy did. So did images of fashion and prosperity in American movies and television shows like Dallas. Such informal bottom-up processes will also play a vital role in helping to turn China from an authoritarian threat into a freer and less hostile power. It will take a long time, and the slow process will garner few headlines, but it can work. A conservative Administration will support efforts by ordinary Americans to engage with ordinary Chinese people through social networks,

Internet memes, fashion, movies, student exchange programs, tourism, and more. China’s leaders are set in their ways, especially with Xi Jinping presumably now in power for life, but the younger generation is more open than their parents were—more individualistic and open to change. Effective outreach to the Chinese people will need the same humility that other sound trade policies require. Government-directed cultural and economic outreach risks being heavy-handed and could backfire. Everyone involved needs to know that the process is generational in scope and will not work overnight. At the very least, Washington should stay out of the way as much as possible when regular people want to contact each other across national, language, and cultural divides. Each of these many components, from tariffs to trade agreements to culture, is a small part of a larger China policy. Many are not attention-grabbing and cannot be put into sound bites. Cultural engagement is not something Washington can plan. China’s own demographic and debt problems, along with aging leadership and growing discontent over the zero-COVID policy, might even cause an internal collapse. American policy must therefore be prepared to face any contingency.

CONCLUSION

A conservative trade policy needs a conservative vision. America’s found- ing institutions, based on free trade and entrepreneurship, have made America the world’s leading economy and will help keep America strong through the next century.

However, recent departures from those principles have hurt America’s econ- omy and weakened alliances that are necessary to contain threats from Russia and China. Reaffirming those principles through policies of openness, dynamism, and free trade will boost America’s economy, make us more resilient against crises, and remove opportunities for progressives and rent-seekers to use the levers of gov- ernment for their own purposes. Rediscovering conservative principles on trade policy and embracing America’s long history as the world’s leading commercial republic are an important part of restoring a government of, by, and for the people.

INDEPENDENT REGULATORY AGENCIES

In addition to the executive departments and agencies discussed previously, a number of independent commissions exist that are loosely affiliated with the executive branch. In general, the President can appoint people to these commissions but cannot remove them, which makes them constitutionally prob- lematic in light of the Constitution’s having vested federal executive power in the President. Nevertheless, they exist, their constitutional legitimacy has generally been upheld by the courts, and there will be an opportunity for the next Adminis- tration to use them as forces for good, particularly by making wise appointments. Few appointments to these commissions will be as important as the President’s selection of the next chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). In Chapter 28, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr writes that the FCC chairman “is empowered with significant authority that is not shared” with other FCC members. Under a new chairman, he writes, “[t]he FCC needs to change course and bring new urgency to achieving four main goals: [r]eining in Big Tech; [p]romoting national security; [u]nleashing economic prosperity; and [e]nsuring FCC accountability and good governance.”

“The FCC,” writes Carr, “has an important role to play in addressing the threats to individual liberty posed by corporations that are abusing dominant positions in the market.” Nowhere is that clearer “than when it comes to Big Tech and its attempts to drive diverse political viewpoints from the digital town square.” Carr writes that the FCC should require more transparency from Big Tech, which today “offers a black box.” And it should issue “an order that interprets Section 230”— which provides protection from legal liability to online computer services that moderate content in good faith—“in a way that eliminates the expansive, non-textual immunities that courts have read into the statute.” In addition to taking unilateral action, Carr says, the FCC should work with Congress on legislative changes to ensure that “Internet companies no longer have carte blanche to censor protected speech while maintaining their Section 230 protections.”

Carr writes that during the Trump Administration, the FCC took an “appro- priately strong approach to the national security threats posed by the Chinese Communist Party.” The FCC put Huawei on its Covered List of entities—its list of those posing “an unacceptable risk” to U.S. national security. Carr writes that TikTok also poses a “serious and unacceptable” risk to U.S. national security, while providing “Beijing with an opportunity to run a foreign influence campaign by determining the news and information that the app feeds to millions of Americans,” and the next Administration should ban it. What’s more, Carr writes, “U.S. busi- nesses are aiding Beijing—often unwittingly”—in its effort to become, by 2030, “the global leader in artificial intelligence.” In part, they are doing so by providing “Bei- jing access to their high-powered cloud computing services.” Carr asserts that “it is time for an Administration to put in place a comprehensive plan that aims to stop U.S. entities from directly or indirectly contributing to China’s malign AI goals .” Former Federal Election Commissioner Hans von Spakovsky writes in Chap- ter 29 that while “the authority of the President over the actions of” the Federal Election Commission “is extremely limited,” the President “must ensure that the [Justice Department], just like the FEC, is directed to only prosecute clear viola- tions” of the Federal Election Campaign Act.

“The department must not construe ambiguous provisions…in a way that infringes on protected First Amendment activity,” he writes. The FEC has six members, three from each party, and its determinations require a majority—so, they require the support of at least one member of each party. DOJ should not “prosecute an individual for supposedly violating the law when the FEC has previously determined that a similarly situated individual has not violated the law,” writes von Spakovsky. Moreover, he writes that the “President should vigorously oppose all efforts”—such as the language in the “For the People Act of 2021”—“to change the structure of the FEC” so that it would have an “odd number” of members. The current structure “ensures that there is bipartisan agreement before any action is taken and protects against the FEC being weaponized.”

In Chapter 27, David R. Burton writes that the Securities and Exchange Com- mission (SEC) “should be reducing impediments to capital formation, not radically increasing them” by pushing a costly “climate change” agenda, as it is doing under the Biden Administration. Discussing the Federal Trade Commission, Adam Can- deub writes in Chapter 30, “Antitrust law can combat dominant firms’ baleful effects on democratic” notions—“such as free speech, the marketplace of ideas, shareholder control, and managerial accountability as well as collusive behavior

with government.” Under the Biden FTC, he writes, firms try “to get out of anti- trust liability by offering climate, diversity, or other forms of ESG-type offerings.” Candeub says that state AGs “are far more responsive to their constituents” than the federal government generally is, and he recommends that the FTC establish a position in the chairman’s office that is “focused on state AG cooperation and inviting state AGs to Washington, DC, to discuss enforcement policy in key sectors under the FTC’s jurisdiction: Big Tech, hospital mergers, supermarket mergers, and so forth.”