Executive Calendar

Floor Speech

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Mr. HAWLEY. Madam President, we have come to the middle hour of our struggle against this epidemic, against a disease unleashed on the world by the failures and falsehoods of a government in Beijing. This epidemic has brought devastation in its wake--lost jobs, lost lives, fear, and isolation. It is shaking old institutions and challenging old ways.

The international order, as we have known it for 30 years, is breaking. Now imperialist China seeks to remake the world in its own image and to bend the global economy to its own will, and we face a moment of truth. Will we acquiesce? Are we, in this Nation, willing to witness the slow undoing of the free world? Are we willing to watch our own way of life, our own liberties and livelihoods grow dependent on the policy of Beijing?

Already, we hear a chorus of voices telling us that America must accept a narrower future. We must live with slower economic growth. We must expect lower wages. We must accommodate ourselves to the rise of China. Well, I, for one, am not willing to settle for less. I am not willing to see blue collar workers go without work for months or years on end as their jobs are shipped overseas. I am not willing to watch wages flatline and fall. I am not willing to see families struggle for food and middle-class neighborhoods disappear, and neither are the American people.

The Nation that sent a man to the Moon and defeated German and Soviet oppression in the space of 50 years will not be content to take second place to the imperialists in Beijing. We will not be content with a small future. Now, as in times past, this Nation must again take control of our own destiny and lead the free world to a better day.

The free nations again confront a common threat. The Chinese Communist Party is a menace to all free peoples. It seeks nothing less than domination. It wants nothing less than word power. This is China's policy: to control Asia and to rule the Pacific. From there, the Chinese Government wants to spread its influence to Africa, to Europe, to South America--a master of home and abroad.

And they are well on their way. For decades now, China has bent and abused and broken the rules of the international economic system to its own benefit. They have stolen our intellectual property and forced our companies to transfer sensitive trade secrets and technology. They have manipulated their currency and cheated time and again on their trade commitments. They have been complicit in the trafficking of persons and relied on the forced labor of religious minorities.

America has suffered. Since Beijing won most favored nation status and joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, we have lost over 3 million jobs to China. During the past two decades, as we fought war after war in the Middle East, the Chinese Government systematically built its military on the backs of the American middle class. Oh, we were promised that things would be different. We were told that giving China access to our markets and allowing them power in the WTO would reform their behavior and it would make them more liberal. We were told it would be good for America and good for the world.

Well, the only nation it was good for was China, and we cannot afford inaction any longer. The threat of China to the free world grows by the day. If the coronavirus pandemic doesn't make that clear, nothing will. What should be equally clear is that the United States must now reform the global economy itself to rebuild our strength and prevent China's bid for domination.

The economy has become the principal arena for the great power contest in this new century. Economic policy is now security policy, and China understands that. China has integrated its economic and security strategies for the last two decades, systematically weaponizing the institutions and procedures of the global economy for its own benefit.

It is the United States that has been slow to respond. Now we must recognize that the economic system designed by Western policymakers at the end of the Cold War does not serve our purposes in this new era, and it does not meet our needs in this new day. And we should admit that multiple of its founding premises were in error.

The economic system over the last 30 years--it is nothing sacred. It is not inevitable. It was a choice, and now we have the power to choose again, to choose differently, and for the better.

You know, it didn't start out this way. Decades ago, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the United States and its allies created a series of economic partnerships and institutions that aimed to strengthen the free world and check Soviet expansion. These agreements encouraged partnership and trade among free nations as sovereign equals. Trade in commerce did increase and barriers did come down, but nations remained in control of their own economies and their own destinies. Important sectors were protected, capital flows controlled, and workers had a place to rise.

But when the Soviet Union fell, ambitious policymakers in this country and other Western nations saw the opportunity to create something new, something in the spirit of Woodrow Wilson, a dream to remake the world. These Western leaders wanted a truly global economy, one that would include all nations, like-minded or not, to be governed by multilateral institutions rather than nation-states, to operate by a single set of rules, to promote the flow of goods and capital across borders. They wanted a single liberal market to support a single liberal international order, one that was supposed to bring peace in our time. Well, that peace never arrived. Instead, these new Wilsonians embroiled the United States in conflict after conflict, war after war for decades, and the new global market they championed flatlined the wages of American workers and shifted American industry overseas, all while multinational corporations reaped the gains.

One of the Wilsonians' new institutions particularly typified these trends. I am talking about the World Trade Organization. It was established in 1995 as a successor to the Cold War-era General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. The idea was for the WTO to help harmonize trading rules the world over and have the teeth to enforce them.

The WTO would have its own court--I was part of the design--a dispute resolution body that would interpret trade agreements and settle the differences between nations over trade. The effect was to take trade disputes out of the hands of elected national leaders and commit them to the control of international lawyers in Geneva.

It worked in the sense that the WTO's court increasingly set trade policy for the world. The old system, the GATT, had allowed for national policy needs to come first--our workers and our industries-- but the WTO reversed these priorities. Now global concerns reigned supreme, which meant the priorities of multinational corporations and global capital.

Not surprisingly, the WTO lawyers have not been kind to America. The WTO's dispute resolution process has systematically disfavored the United States--a complaint that Presidents of both parties have made for years. The United States has lost 90 percent of the cases brought against it, hurting industries across the Nation, from steelworkers in the Rust Belt to cotton farmers in States like mine.

Meanwhile, the WTO dispute resolution body has systematically expanded its own jurisdiction, going beyond the text of the actual trade agreements and citing itself as authority.

That is not all. The WTO permitted China to claim special status as a developing country from the moment China entered the organization even though China was already the sixth richest nation in the world by GDP in the year 2000. China jealously guards that sweetheart deal even today, allowing it to defer its obligations, to skirt the rules we follow, and to continue to amass power at our expense.

I could go on.

The WTO places strict limits on the support we can provide our farmers and ranchers, even as other nations refuse to comply with WTO rulings in favor of our producers.

It is clear that the WTO is deeply flawed. The institution's design makes it nearly impossible to reform, as we saw during the failed go- around, and it remains completely ill-equipped to deal with forced technology transfer and intellectual property theft like we have seen from China for decades.

The American people get the idea. No trade regime can last when it no longer serves the people of the countries that are part of it. The truth is, our interests and those of the WTO diverged many years ago. The WTO is a symbol of an economic order whose Wilsonian ambitions have cost this country dearly, enabling and empowering the rise of an imperialist China.

Now, American leadership is required--it is essential--to chart a new course. This Nation has never been content to linger in the rear while others lead the way, and we will not begin now. We will lead. We will act.

I call on this body to do its part by taking a vote to withdraw from the WTO. The agreement by which we joined that organization expressly affords us this right. It commits to Congress--both Houses--the right to debate the WTO's workings and the right to vote to continue in the WTO or to withdraw. This is a right--it is our responsibility, really-- that the Senate has never exercised since 1995, not one time. We are past due.

We should take up our responsibility and debate this issue critical to the future of our country, and we should vote to leave. To begin a new era, we must end the old. So let's vote, and let it be a new beginning. Let the work begin in earnest to forge a new way forward.

Thinking of that future, I offer two principles to guide our policy.

First, as a member of the world economy, we must never privilege the preferences of other nations or multilateral institutions over the needs of our own people and our own workers. As the leader of the free world, we must empower other countries to resist Chinese imperialism at every turn, whether on their own or standing together with us as a coalition.

To put these principles into action, we must leave the WTO and construct a new trade system that helps the United States grow strong. This new system should retain and deepen the principle of reciprocity. It should encourage cooperation and market access but without compromising nations' economic sovereignty and their internal control of their own economies.

We in America cannot compromise our sovereign right to protect the American people and their livelihoods, so we must replace an empire of lawyers with the confederation of truly mutual trade. Mutual trade will require a new approach to dispute resolution, one that will offer nations flexibility and choice, allow countries to litigate trade disputes like a private contract, through third-party arbitration chosen by the parties on a case-by-case basis, with ground rules agreed upon by both sides and subject to revisions as circumstances warrant, or allow countries to set up enforcement procedures within the trade agreements themselves, like we have done in our recent phase 1 negotiations with China. On either approach, choices over trade will be made and policies will be set, as they should be, by elected leaders who are accountable to the people, not by a court sitting in Geneva

But reform should not stop at trade. We must also think seriously about what occurs upstream from trade, and that means global capital. There is a reason why Wall Street loves the status quo. There is a reason why they will object to leaving the WTO and resist major reforms to our global economic order. That is because they are on a gravy train of foreign capital flows that keep their checkbooks fat. But this foreign money pouring into our country has a distorting effect. We get asset bubbles that could spur recessions, and our exporters have trouble selling abroad. Our farmers and producers know this problem all too well.

So now we must work for new agreements and better managed capital markets to stop currency manipulators and to protect this Nation's producers. By moderating these flows of foreign money, we can help give a much needed boost to our producers at home and finally reverse our massive trade deficit with China and with the world.

Finally, actions at home are only part of the solution. Trade and current policy, after all, are not made in a vacuum. The world is changing, and if we are to halt China's bid for hegemony over the coming decades, we will need to work with our allies and partners to do it. So it is in America's interest to see that other free nations grow strong and that we are able to work together to deter and defeat Chinese economic coercion.

We benefit if countries that share our opposition to Chinese imperialism--countries like India, Japan, Vietnam, Australia, and Taiwan--are economically independent of China and standing shoulder to shoulder with us. So we should actively pursue new networks of mutual trade with key Asian and European partners, like the economic prosperity network recently mentioned by Secretary Pompeo.

We should offer partner nations new incentives to support the purchase of our products made here in America by American workers. A new system of export financing and loan guarantees would serve as a powerful counterweight to China's expanding Belt and Road Initiative, and it would boost demand for our products, raising wages and creating good jobs along the way.

Here again, our aim must be to build networks of strong partners able to stand tall against Chinese aggression while strengthening our workers and fostering our industries.

A new departure is upon us whether we like it or not. The old order is giving way. The future need not be limited, however, not for this country. This moment is full of promise if we have the courage to lead.

We can build a future that looks beyond pandemic to prosperity--a prosperity shared by all Americans, from the rural towns of our country to the urban core.

We can build a future that looks past a failed consensus to meet the national security needs of this new century.

We can build a future that transcends the narrow thinking of the Washington beltway and that gives confidence to American workers and to the communities they call home.

With a global economy that better suits our interests, that better protects our people, we can find the strength and purpose to counter the gravest danger to American workers in a century and to unleash again the promise of our unique and marvelous way of life.

To my colleagues in the Senate, I say: It is time to lead.

Thank you.

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