Secretary Dan Glickman

Permanent Normal Trade Relations is one of the most important decisions facing the Congress and the nation this year. Passing it will allow the United States to be a constructive partner for China, as it slowly but inevitably moves toward greater social, political, and economic freedom.

Should PNTR fail, China will still likely join the WTO. That train is leaving the station; it’s just a matter of us deciding whether to hop along for the ride. If we don’t pass PNTR, we leave ourselves on the outside looking in, inviting our competitors to take advantage of the terms we negotiated and capture the market share that should be ours.

The stakes on PNTR are enormous. It’s about expanding American exports, but it’s also about enhancing our national security and living up to our obligations as a world leader. Many times in our history, we’ve risked a lot more in the name of exercising global leadership. This does not involve sending troops to a dangerous part of the world. It doesn’t even entail any economic risk. The economic benefits are all on our side.

Just over 50 years ago, Secretary of State George Marshall came up with his plan to help rebuild the European nations that had been devastated by World War II. It was bold, and it was controversial. But we did it because it was the right thing to do. And today, we recognize the Marshall Plan as the birth of the Western alliance that has been the foundation of global peace and stability for the last half century.

Now, we can’t perfectly equate the Marshall Plan with PNTR, or Europe in 1947 with China in the year 2000. But there are some parallels. Then, as now, the forces of isolation howled with opposition. And, ultimately, I believe that PNTR could be as important to shaping the geopolitics of the 21^st century as the Marshall Plan was to fashioning the post-war world.

There is one major difference: the Marshall Plan was expensive. PNTR asks nothing from the American people. It doesn’t require that we take any kind of economic hit. On the contrary, PNTR allows us to strengthen our economy at the same time that we achieve a major foreign policy objective. It’s a win-win, and it’s imperative that we not let the opportunity pass us by. 

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