The Trade Debate: Slight and Baffled

There is something of the horrow movie villain about the doha round. You knows its going to die, but it keeps looking like it might come to life, just to be killed one last time. If you can't quite follow what is going on, don't worry. Neither, it appears, can EU Trade boss Peter Mandelson. UK Prime Minister Tony Blair made a speech in California the day before yesterday saying:

I have not at all given up on the WTO trade round. After a long discussion with President Bush after our press conference on Friday, we both agreed we needed to make one final effort to re-energise the negotiation and I hope we can do so within the next few weeks.

A sidenote in this morning's FT claims that Mandelson - formerly Blair's closest advisor - was "slightly baffled" as to what the Prime Minister was going on about. While Mandelson had previously blamed "US Greed" for talk's collapse, today Bruce Bartlett puts the blame squarley on President Bush. Bartlett, who worked for Jack Kemp, knows irresponsible economic policy when he sees it. And he sees it here:

Last week, the Doha Round of trade talks collapsed. Future historians may well conclude that of all the Bush administration's economic mistakes, this one was the biggest. That is because we may have just seen the end of the free-trade consensus that has been at the core of U.S. international economic policy for both parties since World War II. The result may be a new era of protectionism that could be extraordinarily costly and painful.

On that note, i was almost tempted to get a copy of Senator Dorgan's new book, to see how frayed the rope tethering the trade debate to the realities of planet earth has become. But Daily Kos publishes a review, so i don't have to. And yes, Ladies and Gentelman, from the tone of it's comments about "The Toxic Waste of World Trade" we are indeed now floating in space.