The U.S. should seek trade agreements for both economic and security reasons

The decline of the Soviet Union in the 1980s profoundly changed the environment for U.S. trade policy. Trade relationships that disproportionately benefited America’s partners lost a crucial geostrategic justification. Yet the U.S. did not adjust. Outdated trade policy eventually helped breed a sustained protectionist reaction.

Houthi attacks on civilian vessels, strategies to reroute ships, and the need for a 40-nation strong military alliance to guard 15% of the world’s maritime traffic sounds like the kind of emergency that ought to bring trade to its knees. Yet, the Suez Canal has been here before. What’s more, the stretch of water joining Europe to the Indian Ocean will face such crises again and again, forcing shippers to be ready at any moment.

The Iran-aligned Houthis of Yemen are playing an escalating role in the Middle East, attacking shipping in the Red Sea and firing drones and missiles at Israel in a campaign they say aims to support Palestinians in the Gaza war.

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Tuesday announced the creation of a multinational operation to safeguard commerce in the Red Sea in response to the Houthi attacks.

Recently the news broke that the U.S. Navy destroyer USS Carney had fended off several missile and drone attacks in the Red Sea. While Biden administration officials tried to frame the battle, for a battle it surely was, as the Carney’s defending nearby merchant ships, it seems clear that Iranian-supplied Houthis were targeting the Carney directly as well as the commercial ships it was accompanying.

Trade hawks are sounding wistful for the period of intense corporate trade liberalization from which both the Biden and Trump administrations have increasingly been moving away.

It was one around which a big business consensus had formed over the last several decades and the move toward a less free trade focused chapter has alarmed some of its original architects.

China and Israel aim to sign a free-trade agreement by the end of 2022, an Israeli official said on Wednesday, in a breakthrough that would give Beijing its first deal in the Middle East plus a boost after years of trade friction with Australia and the United States.

The largest free trade area in the world came into existence over the weekend — and the U.S. was not even invited.

Why it matters: For the first time in living memory, the hegemon at the center of a major global free trade agreement is not the U.S.

China has stepped into Uncle Sam's shoes, and now anchors the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, or RCEP, an area covering 2.2 billion people and 1/3 of all the economic activity on the planet.

CLAIM: Former Vice President Joe Biden argued on Thursday that during the Obama administration, Democrats were hampered in their promise to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) by Republicans in Congress.

VERDICT: Mostly False. The Obama administration was in office less than four months when the White House announced they would not reopen the agreement. At the time, Democrats held wide majorities in both chambers of Congress, specifically a supermajority in the United States Senate, where any update to NAFTA would have to be ratified.

Warren needs to take a lesson from Leonard Read's "I, Pencil."

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) is promising to protect Americans from the scourge of…pencils?

In a new video posted to Twitter over the weekend, the presidential candidate promises to create a new federal agency that would expand on the protectionist measures undertaken by Donald Trump. She's even borrowing Trumpian rhetoric for the project, which she calls "economic patriotism," as she promises that a Warren administration would put the interests of American workers first.