A Revolving

Apr 11, 2024

Today on TAP: More of the same may be in store at the State Department.

by Robert Kuttner

August 25, 2023

3:00 PM

Shizuo Kambayashi/AP Photo

Then-U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Kurt Campbell speaks to the media at the foreign ministry in Tokyo, January 17, 2013.

Kurt Campbell, currently the White House coordinator for Indo-Pacific Affairs at the National Security Council, is reportedly in line to be named deputy secretary of state. This is not great news for those of us who want global trade policy to serve domestic industrial and labor goals.

Campbell is old-guard. He served as assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs under Obama until 2013, when he left government to form The Asia Group, a consulting and lobbying firm with a range of corporate clients. He used his government contacts and access to serve their interests. Campbell was a big booster of the now defunct Trans-Pacific Partnership, which was basically a corporate wish list masquerading as a trade deal.

If nominated and confirmed as deputy secretary of state, Campbell would join two other senior foreign-policy officials with revolving-door histories. As the Prospect has reported, Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, like Campbell, had a lucrative career as a corporate consultant while the Democrats were out of office. A prime client was Uber.

More from Robert Kuttner

To round out the foreign-policy revolving-door triumvirate, Secretary of State Tony Blinken was a co-founder and managing partner of WestExec, a consulting firm that has delivered upwards of a dozen senior officials to the Biden administration, including Ely Ratner, assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific Affairs. As the Prospect’s then-managing editor Jonathan Guyer wrote in this virtuoso investigative piece on WestExec, the firm’s clients “have controversial interests in tech and defense that intersect with the policies their former consultants are now in a position to set and execute.”

The revolving-door pattern is bad enough for its explicit and tacit conflicts of interest. More insidiously, it reinforces a mentality that gives more weight to a military conception of national security than an economic one. It’s easier to construct a hawkish foreign policy toward China that looks at narrowly defined military and tech issues than to go after deeper economic entanglements where the interests of U.S. corporations and investment bankers are at stake.

Campbell initially shared the view that letting China into the global trading system would promote its transition into a more democratic and market-oriented nation. He is now more of a China hawk—when it comes to narrowly defined national security.

But there has not been a parallel evolution in Campbell’s views on trade and its connection to the domestic aspirations of Bidenomics to build a worker-centered economy. This matters because the details of initiatives such as the proposed Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) are still very much up for grabs, as are the details of Biden’s executive order on export controls.

Campbell has another intimate White House connection. He is married to the chair of Biden’s National Economic Council, Lael Brainard, another senior economic official whose views on trade are old-school liberal rather than new-wave progressive. So the center of gravity in this administration tilts away from tightly linking trade policy to domestic economic policy.

What’s needed is more dissent, not more of a self-reinforcing echo chamber. Sadly, the outliers are people who did not spend the Trump years working as corporate consultants, such as U.S. Trade Rep Katherine Tai, who is tougher on the need to demolish the old, corporate version of free trade. But Tai is not a member of the club.

Robert Kuttner is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, and professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School.

August 25, 2023

3:00 PM

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