JUDY WOODRUFF: It's one of the great economic debates of our era: Should Americans continue
to globalize through trade?
President Trump argued the U.S. is prepared to go it alone during his trip to Asia, but
is this feasible in the 21st century?
Paul Solman reports for weekly series, Making Sense.
DONALD TRUMP, President of the United States: No longer will we allow other countries to
close our factories, steal our jobs and drain our wealth.
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
PAUL SOLMAN: That was Donald Trump in Arizona in August.
And here he was in Vietnam just last week.
DONALD TRUMP: We are not going to let the United States be taken advantage of anymore.
I am always going to put America first, the same way that I expect all of you in this
room to put your countries first.
PAUL SOLMAN: For President Trump, putting America first means replacing multilateral
trade deals, which he thinks are unfair to the U.S., with one-on-one deals.
His evidence that America is getting ripped off by globalization?
Our $500 billion annual trade deficit, half-a-trillion more that we buy from abroad than we sell.
DONALD TRUMP: With Mexico as an example, we have a trade deficit of $71 billion.
That's NAFTA.
We have trade deficits with China that are through the roof.
They're so big and so bad that it's embarrassing saying what the number is.
PAUL SOLMAN: Shortly after taking office, the president visited a star American exporter,
Boeing, to hype its hot new product, the 787 Dreamliner.
DONALD TRUMP: That is one beautiful airplane.
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
DONALD TRUMP: Congratulations to the men and women here who have built it.
What an amazing piece of art.
What an amazing piece of work.
PAUL SOLMAN: So, what is this meant to illustrate?
SIMON JOHNSON, MIT Sloan School of Management: This is the supply chain.
This is where Boeing gets its major pieces for the 787.
PAUL SOLMAN: That's former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson and the pre-assembled pieces
of the Dreamliner.
SIMON JOHNSON: So, this is Japan, and we have got a big piece of fuselage coming in from
Japan, and from Italy, we have a slightly smaller, but still important piece of fuselage.
You're going to take the cockpit made in Kansas.
PAUL SOLMAN: And so that goes up here.
SIMON JOHNSON: And you're going to add the tail piece, which is coming out of South Carolina.
PAUL SOLMAN: South Carolina.
SIMON JOHNSON: Now, hold on a minute.
From China -- this is very important -- you still need the rudder.
PAUL SOLMAN: Putting the plane together is a fantastic feat of American know-how, says
Johnson.
But the product itself is a thoroughly global division of labor, in which firms around the
world specialize and become, well, world-class at what they make and send our way.
SIMON JOHNSON: But we're not done.
You're still missing a few pieces.
PAUL SOLMAN: Wings flown in from Japan.
Horizontal stabilizers from Italy.
Landing gear from Simon Johnson's country of origin, Great Britain.
You're proud of these, are you?
SIMON JOHNSON: Some of the best wheels that Britain has ever produced, absolutely.
(LAUGHTER)
SIMON JOHNSON: And we can offer you, as an option available on the final model, this
fine Rolls-Royce engine, although, of course, you have your choice of GE engines, should
you so choose.
PAUL SOLMAN: Moreover, says Johnson:
SIMON JOHNSON: By having all these suppliers around the world, you're also persuading them
and their governments and their airlines to buy your plane.
So, we have got the Chinese buying the plane, we have got the Koreans buying the plane.
We have the Indians buying the plane.
They make a part of the floor actually of the 787.
And we have got the Japanese buying a lot of these planes.
This is creating the global market.
This is what's making it possible actually to develop and have a 787.
PAUL SOLMAN: For obvious reasons, airlines in countries with 787 parts suppliers are
Boeing's biggest and most reliable 787 customers.
Japan's purchase of 787s means close to $20 billion of revenue for Boeing all by itself.
So, part of Boeing's strategy is to get all these other players, countries, into the game
by locating production in those countries.
SIMON JOHNSON: It's absolutely about getting them into the game.
Beyond that, it's about the size of the global market.
How many of these planes can you sell and to whom?
PAUL SOLMAN: But the argument is that, as we outsource to all these companies and countries,
we are, and are we not, losing American jobs?
SIMON JOHNSON: There are absolutely some good jobs developing in this supply chain, but
there's a lot of good jobs are staying in America, they're staying in Kansas, they're
staying in South Carolina, they're staying in Seattle.
And, in fact, the existence of those jobs is made possible by the global market that
Boeing creates through this network of suppliers.
So, supply side and the demand side are intertwined in this industry.
PAUL SOLMAN: But let me be very specific.
Right now, there's an argument about whether or not we should stay in NAFTA.
And it looks like we're going to leave the North American Free Trade Agreement.
What have you got there?
SIMON JOHNSON: And here comes Aeromexico.
PAUL SOLMAN: Why Mexico?
SIMON JOHNSON: Well, they are part of this conversation.
They sell to Boeing and they buy planes from Boeing.
Certainly, tearing up NAFTA would be -- make a lot of this kind of relationship difficult.
DONALD TRUMP: I told you from the first day we will renegotiate NAFTA or we will terminate
NAFTA.
PAUL SOLMAN: President Trump has been loud and clear, so, too, his top trade adviser,
economist Peter Navarro.
PETER NAVARRO, Trump Economic Adviser: You have got GM and Ford over the last few years
taking billions of dollars to invest in new assembly plants in Mexico, rather than in
Michigan.
Why did they go to Mexico?
Because of aspects of the unfair trade deal of NAFTA.
PAUL SOLMAN: Is there any advantage at all to any of these trade deals?
PETER NAVARRO: Consumers are considered winners, but I would argue that they're much bigger
losers when it comes to jobs and paychecks and tax base than they are getting a few cents
off at the Wal-Mart buying cheap made-in-China.
PAUL SOLMAN: But, so far, the other countries in those multilateral agreements don't seem
interested in one-on-one deals.
Increasingly, America first looks like America alone.
So, I asked economist and historian Adam Tooze: Could the United States go it alone economically?
ADAM TOOZE, Columbia University: Well, it's a hypothetical question, but, if any economy
could, it's probably the United States, because it's so large, it has so much internal climatic
diversity, it has natural resources, the science base, the productive capacity.
PAUL SOLMAN: , So we can make anything, we can grow anything?
ADAM TOOZE: Yes, absolutely.
And you have the capacity to innovate things that we don't know of yet that might serve
as substitutes for things we have decided no longer to import from abroad.
PAUL SOLMAN: So, then, why not go it alone?
ADAM TOOZE: Well, there are huge costs to exiting an efficient division of labor with
the world economy.
PAUL SOLMAN: Conservative economist Peter Morici is even more blunt.
PETER MORICI, Former Director of Economics, U.S. International Trade Commission: We'd
all be very irritable by 10:00 on Monday morning.
Where would we get our coffee?
We grow a little bit of it in Hawaii, but, largely, we are dependent on imports, and
can't grow it here.
PAUL SOLMAN: But coffee?
I mean, how big a deal is coffee?
PETER MORICI: Really?
(LAUGHTER)
PETER MORICI: There are a lot of things that are not that big a deal, but Americans are
accustomed to them.
What I'm trying to say is, is that we'd have a much lower standard of living if we wholly
went it alone.
There wouldn't be the incentive to be competitive.
There wouldn't be the incentive to innovate.
So, on many fronts, America would be simply backward.
PAUL SOLMAN: Consider the old Soviet Union, says Morici, satirized in this 1980s Wendy's
commercial
ACTOR: Is next, evening wear.
NARRATOR: Having a choice is better than none.
ACTOR: Is next, swimwear.
PETER MORICI: It's a classic example of what happens when you try to limit trade with the
outside and do it all yourself.
It's one of the reasons that the standard of living, even today in Russia, is so low.
Once you fall behind, it's very difficult to catch up again.
It's free trade that gives us the modern consumer economy.
PETER NAVARRO: The Trump trade doctrine is this.
America will trade with any country, so long as that deal meets these three criterion.
You increase GDP growth rate.
You decrease the trade deficit.
And you strengthen the manufacturing base.
PAUL SOLMAN: Finally, we put the question to Simon Johnson.
What about the argument that, if there's any country on Earth that can go it alone economically,
it would be the United States of America?
SIMON JOHNSON: We have the largest single economy, but we're only 330 million people.
This is a world of seven billion.
If you want to make something really big, really innovative, like the 787, you need
the entire global market.
You need access to all seven billion people.
PAUL SOLMAN: For the "PBS NewsHour," this is economics correspondent Paul Solman, reporting
this time from pretty much everywhere.