2018年8月1日，纽约通信公司Vested首席经济学家Milton Ezrati在National Interest发表署名文章《特朗普正在挑起一场贸易战》，现中英双语全文编译仅供参考。文章版权归原作者所有，观点不代表本机构立场。

图片：华盛顿特区运动衫的标签上有美国国旗，但在2011年1月14日美国华盛顿特区的纪念品摊位上写着“中国制造”。路透社/ Kevin Lamarque

Trump Is Tempting a Trade War

Why is Donald Trump playing with fire?

作者：Milton Ezrati(National Interest的特约编辑，该公司是布法罗大学人力资本研究中心即纽约州立大学的附属机构，也是纽约通信公司Vested的首席经济学家。)

编译：学术plus

原载：https://nationalinterest.org/feature/trump-tempting-trade-war-27522

There can be little doubt that Trump, by imposing tariffs and tempting trade war, is playing with fire. Without a quick resolution to this game of threats and counter threats, the world’s economy will travel down a path that leads to recession or worse. Even so, it is preposterous to accuse Trump, as much of the media and many of this country’s trading partners have, of “upending the global trade order built by the U.S.,” to use the words of a recent New York Times headline. The order for which America’s trading partners pretend to pine died decades ago, killed by the Bushes, the Clintons, the European Union (EU), and others. Even Trump cannot kill what has already died.

特朗普通过征收关税挑起贸易战，毫无疑问他又开始玩火了。如果不迅速解决这一威胁和反击威胁的游戏，世界经济将走上导致经济衰退或更糟的道路。即便如此，指责特朗普“颠覆美国建立的全球贸易秩序”是荒谬的。几十年前美国的贸易伙伴假装渴望的所谓“秩序”早已被布什，克林顿，欧盟（EU）和其他人杀害。即便特朗普也无法杀死已死之人。

The original free-trade order, built assiduously by the United States in the decades following World War II and seemingly the stuff of nostalgia at the New York Times and elsewhere, bears no resemblance to the trade order that has dominated for the last thirty-some years. It sought open trade universally throughout the international community. It actively eschewed the more recent practice of establishing exclusive trading blocs like NAFTA and the now-failed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). These sorts of arrangements, what trade economists refer to as preferential trade agreements (PTAs), use the language of free trade but are the farthest thing from universal. They impose barriers on all but the signatories, often more stringent than existed prior to their formation.

美国在第二次世界大战后的几十年中刻苦地建立起来的原始自由贸易秩序，与过去三十年代占主导地位的贸易秩序完全不同。它在整个国际社会普遍寻求开放贸易，并积极地避开了最近建立独家贸易集团的做法，如北美自由贸易协定和现已失败的跨太平洋伙伴关系（TPP）。贸易经济学家称之为优惠贸易协定（PTAs）的这些安排虽然使用了自由贸易的语言，但却与之相去甚远。它们对签署者以外的所有人增加了壁垒，甚至要比之前更加严格。

Washington’s original commitment to a universal approach emerged even as World War II raged. No doubt the drive stemmed from the ugly experiences with the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of the 1930s, which some economists claim caused the Great Depression and all agree contributed greatly to its depth and duration. As early as 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt exhibited Washington’s direction by attaching to the lend-lease agreement to support Britain a provision that any recipient of such aid must cooperate with the United States to create a liberal, open, post–war would economic system. The Atlantic Charter, signed with British prime minister Winston Churchill in 1941, included similar language. In 1943, Washington proposed what it called an International Trade Organization (ITO), a precursor to today’s World Trade Organization (WTO), to set global “rules for commerce.”

尽管第二次世界大战肆虐，华盛顿承诺仍然得以实施并被普及。其驱动力毫无疑问源于20世纪30年代斯穆特 - 霍利关税，一些经济学家认为这导致了大萧条，而所有人都认为其对大萧条的深度和持续起到了推波助澜的作用。早在1940年富兰克林罗斯福总统通过附加贷款租赁协议，向英国提出一项规定，即任何获得此类援助者必须与美国合作，建立一个自由开放的战后经济体系。1941年与英国首相温斯顿丘吉尔签署的“大西洋宪章”也有类似的表述。1943年，华盛顿提出了所谓的国际贸易组织（ITO），这是当今世界贸易组织（WTO）的前身。

For decades after the close of hostilities, Washington worked through the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which grew out of the ITO proposal, to remove trade restrictions among all, not just a few trading nations. Initial rounds of negotiations first enlarged the number of countries acceding to GATT. Washington, in the words of then undersecretary of state for economic affairs, William L. Clayton, claimed that “economic advancement and political freedom would benefit from the liberal principles of free markets.” By the early 1960s, Washington worked through GATT’s so-called Dillon Round of negotiations to secure 10 percent tariff reductions throughout the international community, despite considerable European resistance. The Kennedy Round of the mid-1960s and the Tokyo Round in the early 1970s further reduced tariffs across the entire international trading community.

在敌对行动结束几十年后，华盛顿通过“关税与贸易总协定”（GATT）制定了一项协议，该协议源于ITO提案，旨在消除所有贸易限制，而不仅仅是少数几个贸易国家。最初几轮谈判首先扩大了加入关贸总协定的国家数量。用当时负责经济事务的副国务卿威廉·莱克顿的话说，华盛顿声称“经济发展和政治自由将受益于自由市场原则。”到20世纪60年代初，尽管在欧洲遇到强大阻力，但华盛顿通过所谓的GATT狄龙回合谈判确保整个国际社会降低10％的关税。

This universal approach began to break down in the 1980s. Under pressure from the trade and currency disputes of the 1970s, the burden of expensive energy imports, and the frightening rise of Japanese economic power, Washington abandoned universal efforts and turned toward PTAs, presumably as a defense against formidable trade adversaries. NAFTA is an early example. It was negotiated in the late 1980s under President George H. W. Bush and implemented in the 1990s under President Bill Clinton. It does indeed promote free trade between Mexico, Canada, and the United States. Otherwise, it excludes the rest of the world, most pointedly at the time, Japan. It is almost as far from universal as trade can get. The TPP would have pointedly excluded China, Europe and others. Even the EU counts as a PTA. It secures open trade among its members, but others—China, Japan, the United States, India, and many more—face considerable trade impediments imposed by the bloc.

20世纪80年代这种经济秩序逐渐开始崩溃。20世纪70年代的贸易和货币纠纷的压力，昂贵的能源进口负担，以及日本经济实力的惊人崛起之下，华盛顿为了抵御强大的贸易对手从而转向了优惠贸易协定。例如NAFTA，它在20世纪80年代后期由乔治·H·W·布什总统推进谈判，并在20世纪90年代由比尔克林顿总统执行的。它确实促进了墨西哥、加拿大和美国之间的自由贸易。但是它排除了世界其他地区，尤其是日本。TPP也明确排除中国，欧洲和其他国家。甚至欧盟也算作是一种优惠贸易协定。

The rising PTA approach killed the last attempt at more universal tariff reduction. In the early 2000s, the WTO lead such an attempt, called the Doha Round after its venue. It failed after months of negotiations, in large part due to European resistance, on agricultural matters particularly. No additional efforts have emerged in the fifteen-some years since. That failure led former WTO Director General Pascal Lamy and a long list of august trade economists to decry PTAs, even as the media erroneously treated them as agents of free trade. Lamy and these economists periodically beg the powers of this world—Washington, Brussels, Beijing, Tokyo, and New Delhi among them—to return to the more universal efforts at free trade, for which Washington originally strived.

优惠贸易协定确保了其成员之间的开放贸易，阻止了最后一次降低关税的尝试。在21世纪初期，世界贸易组织也进行了这种尝试，多哈回合经过漫长的谈判，特别是由于欧洲在农业问题上的抵制，最终失败了。之后的十五年里，情况仍没有改变。尽管媒体错误地将世贸组织视为自由贸易的象征，但这一失败导致世贸组织前总干事帕斯卡尔拉米和一长串八十年代贸易经济学家谴责优惠贸易协定。拉米和这些经济学家不断呼吁世界大国（华盛顿，布鲁塞尔，北京，东京和新德里）再次回归自由贸易的初心。

If the media and America’s trading partners want to accuse Trump of upending the global trade order, they owe it to their readers to identify which order they fear Trump will upend. Is it the one of PTAs or is it the original, more universal effort at free trade? Trump, of course, seems not to care at all. It is a good bet that he, like his accusers, remains entirely unaware of how thoroughly notions of a world trade order have changed over time.

如果媒体和美国的贸易伙伴想要指责特朗普颠覆全球贸易秩序，那么他们应该证明他们担心特朗普将会颠覆何种秩序。目前的贸易是否是保留自由贸易的初衷？特朗普根本不关心。可以肯定的是，他和他的控告者一样，完全没有意识到世界贸易秩序的概念在一段时间内是如何彻底改变的。

Trump clearly aims to alter the status quo. To what is much less clear. He cannot want a trade war, much as he seems willing to risk one to secure his objectives, whatever they are. Whether he is aware of the economic catastrophe one would bring, his advisors, most of them at least, are and have no doubt warned him many times. Most of his rhetoric implies that he would willingly work within the more recent PTA order, that he just wants what he describes as a “better deal” that would tilt the playing field more in this country’s direction. If, however, he meant what he said when he departed the recent G-7 meetings in Canada, that his aim is to force the elimination of trade barriers and subsidies everywhere, then he would seem to want to jettison the PTA order and replace it with an approach more like the one pursued by Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy. Pascal Lamy, his colleagues, and others can only hope.

特朗普显然旨在改变现状。但他想要的并不是一场贸易战，尽管他似乎愿意冒着贸易战的风险来捍卫他的目标。他的大多数言论暗示他愿意在更近期的PTA秩序中工作，他只是想要他所描述的“更好的交易”。但假如按照他在离开加拿大举行的七国集团会议时所说的，他的目的是强制消除各地的贸易壁垒和补贴，那么他似乎想放弃PTA秩序并取而代之。更像是在追求一种罗斯福，杜鲁门，艾森豪威尔和肯尼迪式的秩序。帕斯卡尔拉米和他的同事们只好希望如此了。

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