Michael Froman Oral History, interview 2

I’m pretty sure when we ended, Mike, we were just transitioning to USTR [U.S. Trade Representative] and finishing up your time at the White House proper, understanding that the USTR is part of the EOP [Executive Office of the President], but it is its own unique thing. As we make the transition forward, I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to reflect on our first set of times together: anything that you left out, anything you’d like to emphasize, any bookend you want to do on the first conversation.

Not that I can think of. Remind me where we ended.

You had just been confirmed.

OK, we went through the process of me deciding where to go. I don’t think I have anything to add at this point.

It was fun rereading it. I pulled out the binder that your research team did, which is somewhere between nostalgic and PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder]. [laughter]

We were in the spring, then, when you were confirmed in 2013, the first year of the President’s second term. There was a G8 [Group of 8] Summit in Northern Ireland that June, so would you want to start with that?

As you think about that, obviously your role shifted, right? When you became USTR, you were no longer a sherpa, but a lot of your issues ended up figuring back into the G7/G8.

Yes. I did not go to that G8 or the G7 meeting. I had already transitioned out of that role and was no longer going to those summits.

According to the timeline, the first thing you would have done in your new role was the trip to Africa in June of 2013.

Yes, I did do that with the President.

The timeline that I have says, “Froman travels with [Barack] Obama to attend G8 Summit in Northern Ireland on the 17th,” and that you are confirmed on the 19th, 93 to 94. Is that not right?

I don’t think I was at that G7, no.

OK, we’ll make a note of that for the future.

When did he go to Africa? Was that from Northern Ireland, or—

“Froman travels with Obama on the 26th to Senegal, South Africa, and Tanzania.”

Yes, that’s right.

And they announced the Trade Africa, a new partnership with sub-Saharan Africa.

Exactly.

Had you been working on that at the White House? Obviously that stuff all comes through the International Economics Office. It’s a funny place to start your tenure at USTR, right? Typically it’s not where we think of the bulk of activity, but it had been ongoing for 20 years, going back to the [William J.] Clinton administration at least, if not before.

Exactly, and, as it turned out, I ended up being the senior official or the Cabinet member who ended up spending the most time in Africa, between the first four years and the USTR, frankly by happenstance. As we talked about last time, we did Power Africa; we did Feed the Future, which had a big Africa focus; and then, as you said, we launched Trade Africa.

Then, with that, the AGOA [African Growth and Opportunity Act] renewal came later, and these AGOA summits, which rotated from Africa to Washington, back and forth, so there was also, as appropriate in Washington, pulling the President into that at the State Department in between going to Gabon and Addis for the African-hosted parts of those AGOA summits.

But yes, as it turned out, there was stuff I had worked on for the first term from the White House, including helping to plan the President’s trip there, the launch of Trade Africa. It was the first thing I ended up doing—or one of the first things—as USTR, in June of that year.

At that point, you’re not in difficult-decision mode; you’re in an announcing, promoting, celebrating role. Does anything jump out at you about that and decisions made in that period? President Obama, yourself, other Cabinet members, Congress?

Well, obviously, the President’s travels to Africa were a highlight. Everyone was highly anticipating his visit there. He was very focused on it. There were high expectations, of course, being the first African American President.

These were his first visits to Africa?

He’d gone to Kenya once before, I believe, in the first term, hadn’t he?

That’s right.

He’d gone to Kenya. He’d given an important speech on anticorruption while he was there, and he did this again in South Africa. On his trip, there was a fair amount of tough love as a theme. He felt it was important, that he had credibility to give in a way that another President might not, so the speech in Cape Town was a pretty hard-hitting speech on corruption and governance.

On the trade side, we were beginning to focus on how we evolve from treating Africa as a preference partner, like GSP [Generalized System of Preferences] and AGOA, a one-way trade agreement, and instead more as a reciprocal trade partner. The European Union had begun doing that in their economic partnership agreements with Africa, had done so in a, frankly, ham-handed way and got a lot of negative attention from the Africans for the way they went about doing it. We were determined to try to do it better, to try to get to the point where we could really negotiate an FTA [Free Trade Agreement] with an African country, rather than just give them one-sided trade preferences.

You’ll recall—This is now jumping ahead—there was the effort to renew AGOA. We renewed it for either 10 or 15 years—it was the longest time it had ever been renewed—before we put some new, strengthened provisions in there. We issued a report about what it would take to do reciprocal trade relations with Africa and identified Kenya as the most likely partner to do that with, which the [Donald J.] Trump administration, to their credit, followed through on and began at least the beginnings of some negotiations. It didn’t conclude, but they began some negotiations of an FTA with Kenya accordingly.

What criteria did the administration use to make that decision [inaudible] but also where they are in their economic development, but is there anything else we’re missing?

Well, it was really a question of their willingness to open up and subject themselves to competition, which economists will teach us over the long run is very good for them, but in the short run can be quite disruptive. We always knew that whatever we did with Africa, in terms of a reciprocal relationship, would have to be very long-term in orientation. The transition would have to be a long period of time. We weren’t worried about the huge influx of imports from Africa undermining U.S. workers. It was about creating the principle that these countries had matured to a level in their economic development where they wanted to have these reciprocal relations. Of course, they were doing their own free trade kinds of negotiations, both in what were called regional economic communities—there was an East African community; there was a West African community; there was SADC [South African Development Community], a South African community—and in a continent-wide free trade agreement.

Now, it doesn’t look much like most of our FTAs—It’s not nearly as ambitious; the timeframes are much longer—but the fact is that—and this is part of a general trend—developing countries and emerging markets who used to resist the notion of free trade had begun to embrace it as something that would help attract investment, that would help drive competitiveness, that would help them integrate into global supply chains.

And they were doing this precisely at the time when the advanced industrialized countries were moving away from free trade and were beginning to question the orthodoxy around it. So you had this rather anomalous situation that for years the North had lectured the South about the virtues of economic liberalization, and the South now got it, embraced it, and it was the North that was beginning to question it.

What about China, Mike? What are you seeing in these relationships, or are you seeing relationships, either regionally in Africa or country by country with China?

Certainly China was all over Africa in terms of diplomatic engagement, economic aid, lots of investment, including in infrastructure. I can’t remember that we talked about it last time, but the origins of Power Africa were in part because we saw how China was investing in Africa and wanted to provide an alternative. We weren’t likely to build bridges and highways and airports, but we did have a lot of private sector interest in energy, including clean energy.

Launching Power Africa and bringing the U.S. private sector to the table to show an alternative way of investing to what China was doing was very important, and it went to how many local people were hired versus what China did—which was to bring in all Chinese workers to work at the energy plants—to the nature of the transactions themselves, making sure they were in their interest.

On that trip, I recall the speech in Cape Town that the President gave. Part of his message was Africa should be interested in investment from all over the world, including China, but they should make sure that the transactions, the agreements that were negotiated, were in their interest, not just in the interest of the other party. That was a powerful message to be sending, and it required us to be able to bring to the table our own private sector to engage in what we thought was a more constructive way.

Do you remember any reaction from the Africans, either in the run-up to the meetings or on the ground, about China? Was it more leaning in the direction of, “Yes, but we really need this trade and investment,” or, “Yes, we have these concerns, and we wish you’d speak up louder,” or a mix of both?

It was more of the latter. They welcomed Chinese investment, but they saw it in all of its dimensions, the pros and the cons. And the more China was involved in Africa, the more they wanted the U.S. to also be involved in Africa, as a bit of a counterbalance. I remember a conversation in Tanzania on that trip, as well, with the leadership there: we were talking about the opportunities for investment in those countries, and how important it was that the U.S. be involved.

This is all in the shadow still, on which we spent a great part of the first interview with you: the 2008–09 financial crisis, with limited wherewithal in the United States to help with aid on a number of these issues. How much do you recall in that period was the hangover of the financial crisis still present in Africa?

Not so much. One of the sad benefits that Africa enjoyed was that they were not terribly well plugged into international financial markets, so they were not terribly adversely affected by the financial crisis. They neither benefited greatly from what was happening in the run-up to 2008, nor were they terribly adversely affected afterward. There was some pullback, generally, from risk assets, including emerging market assets, but it was not much of an overhang by this time.

In Tanzania, President Obama and former President George W. Bush attended a ceremony to honor the Americans who were lost in the bombings at the U.S. Embassy in Dar es Salaam in 1998. Were you a part of that ceremony, and did you see the two Presidents speaking to each other?

I was there. I wasn’t part of the planning of it, but yes. It was a coincidence. It was not long planned that President Bush would go there because President Obama was going to be there; it was he had planned to be there in Tanzania. He was going to do something around the remembrance, and it made for a very good bipartisan moment. They seemed to get along quite well, from what I could tell. I was not party to their personal discussions, but there seemed to be good chemistry between them.

One last question—and I think this will keep coming up as our interview transpires, because the last time we saw you was prepandemic, and we’re now in hopefully some late stage, but maybe not, of the current pandemic. Disease and public health issues have long been a part of U.S. relations with Africa, particularly thanks to President Bush and his big investment in HIV/AIDS [human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome]. Obviously that remained a priority through the Obama administration.

I’m sure that some of these issues came up when you were at the White House proper in charge of international economic affairs, but in your new role, the one place where this has tended to come up in the past has been in pharmaceuticals and around that. Do you remember those issues being on the table at the time? Was the ongoing investment in HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria on the table for those meetings? And was there a trade component that you were paying attention o?

For that trip, certainly PEPFAR [United States President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief] was in the background, and our continued commitment to PEPFAR. There were some big commitments made at the various pledging conferences during the first term, around World AIDS Day, so the Obama administration certainly continued that commitment. At that point, those trade issues were not really on the table; it was really about making sure the PEPFAR had the full financial support of the administration.

Later on, when we get to TPP [Trans-Pacific Partnership], certainly the IP [intellectual property] issues around pharmaceuticals were major elements of the negotiations, both with trading partners and, of course, back here in the United States with the industry and with Congress.

One last question on Africa, and I ask this now, the day after we learned the news of Rich Trumka passing away. On every trade issue, U.S. Labor reactions must now be part of your daily reading, thinking, acting, being. As time has passed on all of these issues—but particularly with respect to Africa—what do you remember in that regard? I have my own memories, but they’re much older than yours here.

As I recall—I could be wrong—of all the trade issues, labor was not focused on Africa. There wasn’t much of a manufacturing competitiveness. There was in, for example, where we had trade disputes with South Africa around auto parts or something like that, but it was not a huge issue for labor. There were more agricultural issues, and I was just joking with Senator [Christopher] Coons that between the Delaware delegation and the Georgia delegation, I could rarely have a conversation with them that didn’t come down to chickens in Africa and getting access to the chicken market in Africa. [laughter] Those were big issues, including, ultimately, with South Africa, where we brought the trade relationship to the brink over chicken, and ultimately succeeded.

But more on our export side, rather than concern about us importing cheap goods from Africa?

Correct. Under AGOA, Africa had duty-free access to our market for several thousand tariff lines, not all of which they were able to take advantage of, but when it came to textiles and apparel and footwear and some agricultural products, they were able to take advantage. There were some manufacturing products that they could take advantage of there. The reality is the tariffs were not the fundamental issue, because, with few exceptions, our tariffs were not very large, not very high.

It was really all the other things that made African producers competitive or not competitive, including infrastructure in Africa and how much more expensive it was to get a product from Africa to the United States than to get it from Colombia to the United States, how much more time it took, how much more money it took. The poor infrastructure, the access to electricity: it’s hard to have a real manufacturing industry if you don’t have access to affordable and reliable electricity, things of that sort.

That’s what Trade Africa was really all about. It was about trying to eliminate unnecessary frictions in the system to help make African producers more competitive for regional trade within Africa, but also for export. It was dealing with issues like at the port of Mombasa, or at the border between Kenya and Rwanda, and rather than it taking a week for a truck to cross over, trying to do it in a matter of hours. Those were the areas of focus that we decided to have on Trade Africa to help address the nontariff obstacles to African exports.

And how interested, as a general matter, was President Obama in this level of technical detail? I had the experience with President Clinton of him overwonking things that I thought were even below my radar. How did you feel on that front in terms of what you needed to brief him on and where he wanted to dig in?

He was willing to get into whatever detail one needed. Again, when we get to TPP, I’m sure we’ll be talking about his negotiation of the whey tariff with the Prime Minister of Japan, over sushi. He was willing to get into as much detail as necessary, but a lot of it was just that he got it, and it was common sense.

We sat down and said, “Tariffs: we’re going to take care of that with AGOA; we’ll take care of that with the reciprocal trade agreement. But the real issue is the lack of competitiveness of the system, the infrastructure, the obstacles.” He’d been to Africa before. He’d studied it; he totally got that that was an important area of focus, so he was very interested, and it came quite intuitively to him, I found, not just in Africa, but more generally.

By the way, I’ll tell you one funny anecdote on Trade Africa. We were trying to come up with some money to implement some of the programs, and it turned out that when those truck drivers are stuck at the border of Kenya and Rwanda for a week, what are they doing? Well, they’re hanging out with prostitutes, and they’re getting, or passing on, HIV.

So PEPFAR actually gave us a little bit of money for Trade Africa, because their view was if we could get those truck drivers across the border in a day rather than five days, it was going to have a direct impact on the spread of HIV.

I’ve never heard that story before. It’s fascinating. In my time in India, that ended up being a problem state to state in India, exact same thing: the border crossings from one state to another in India ended up becoming major replicating points.

I was very grateful to PEPFAR. It wasn’t a lot of money—10, 20 million dollars, something like that—but the fact that they could see the value in it in terms of prevention I thought was a great, open-minded perspective on their part, and helped us get it off the ground quickly.

That raises a really interesting and broader question, too, Mike, about USAID [United States Agency for International Development], for example. We’re doing this project on Hillary Clinton’s time at the State Department, and her interest in women, peace, and security, her setting up or continuing the Global Women’s Initiative, and Melanne Verveer being named a new ambassador in that realm. Were you dealing with any of those people, from the Secretary downward, on these development issues? Clearly that’s part and parcel of all of these things you’re having to consider about free trade and various agreements around the world.

Absolutely, and certainly Secretary Clinton and her whole team were very much focused on development. They were very hands-on when it came to USAID and its management. As an example, when we launched the Food Security Initiative in L’Aquila in 2009, she and the State Department then took that over and really built it out into Feed the Future and ran with it. It was something she felt personally very strongly about and brought a lot of experience and expertise to.

I’m glad that Barbara asked that question because I was going to jump to TPP, but maybe this is a good point to pause. You’ve just become confirmed. It’s the beginning of a second term. Now you’re formally a member of the Cabinet, I’m guessing, as USTR, at least if you followed in Bob Zoellick’s insistence that it stay a Cabinet position.

It’s a bit of a transition in two regards: one, it’s a new, second term, so there’s a new Cabinet; and two, you’ve now stepped from being staff to being somewhat elevated as a Cabinet member. Do you want to talk about that a little bit? Does it feel different? Do you wake up in the morning, looking in the mirror, saying, “Hey, I’m a Cabinet member”? [laughter]

As you know, in the U.S., at least in recent history, we’re not much of a Cabinet government, so I can probably count the number of Cabinet meetings I went to on two hands. You’re right: it feels different. One reason I ultimately decided to focus my interest in USTR was that it would force me to be a principal—particularly externally—with Congress, with the media. As a staffer, even a White House staffer, you have a limited role in those kinds of interactions, and I felt like those were muscles I wanted to develop further. As a Cabinet-level position, USTR allowed that to happen.

I don’t want to overstate it, because I was pretty privileged at the White House to be able to call up any Cabinet member and get them to come in and talk through issues and get things resolved. But certainly when you’re one of them, it makes it even easier—whether it was Secretary [Thomas] Vilsack, or [Joseph] Jack Lew, or the head of the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency], Gina McCarthy, and others, Tom Perez, other agencies I needed to coordinate with on trade policy—as a peer.

Was it typical—when you would interact with the members of the Cabinet you just named, in important positions—that you were reaching out to them, and/or did they reach out to you? And if so, how often, and about what?

Certainly as we got into TPP—and T-TIP [Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership], to a certain degree—there’s a whole USTR-led interagency process, which is statutory, but in my view it’s not enough. It’s a staff-level process to make sure draft negotiating text is approved by all the relevant agencies, things of that sort.

To really get the kind of consensus and leadership you need on those issues, it had to come from the top, so it was mostly me reaching out to them, to Tom Perez. We want to make labor a key part of TPP. Vietnam is going to be a particular challenge. I wanted him to be a partner in that whole effort, and his full team, and he was a great partner in that effort.

Sometimes another agency would hear of things we were doing, or would see it as an opportunity to get involved in something with Europe that they were having trouble dealing with, and they would come to me in that case. But I’d say more often it was me reaching out to them, saying, “We need to come up with a new Ag [Agriculture] package. We need to come up with a new labor package. We need your expertise, from your agency, to help inform USTR staff on how best to do this.”

Ultimately, of course, I wanted them side by side with me when we went up to the Hill to explain it and defend it and promote it with folks up on the Hill, because they would have that credibility.

Mike, it was quite interesting, the Cabinet members that you listed: Vilsack, Agriculture; McCarthy, EPA; Jack Lew at Treasury; and Tom Perez at Labor. I’m tempted to ask you to extend your remarks there to other Cabinet without excluding any, but that sounds like the wheelhouse of USTR.

Let me ask about the State Department. John Kerry was Secretary of State. Were you mostly dealing with him, or with an under secretary for economic affairs? What was the relationship there like?

I dealt with Kerry periodically, but he was certainly preoccupied with other things, so I’d either deal with one of the deputies or with the under secretary. The under secretary was always part of our process, but if I had to, I’d go to Tony or to Jack, before he moved over, or Tom Nides as well.

By the way, to extend my remarks: Commerce was a key piece of this, and Penny [Sue Pritzker] was a very close partner on all sorts of issues. The FDA [Food and Drug Administration] was a close partner, and I would involve Sylvia [Burwell] at HHS [Health and Human Services] in various things. I’m trying to think of who else I’m missing. There was a pretty large swath of the Cabinet who we ended up pulling into trade policy in one way or the other.

Let me give you a great example. At Commerce, the head of NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration], Kathryn Sullivan, former astronaut, was unbelievably helpful, including up on the Hill, talking about the benefits of TPP, for example, for the environment. Interior played a role, because we talk about fish and wildlife, and illegal trade and endangered species, which they’re in charge of. Lots and lots of agencies were involved.

As you go through that list of names—Many of those people you knew either from the first term, or many you’d known for decades, going back to Clinton years and the like—can you give me a sense of the camaraderie of the group, and/or frictions, tensions, challenges, and how much you or the White House needed to lean in to manage particular relationships?

The Cabinet was pretty high on camaraderie and low on conflict. We got together in little groups periodically for dinner. We got together every year for a dinner before the State of the Union, and went to the State of the Union together. We’d have dinner upstairs at the Monocle, as a group, and then all get shuttled over to the Capitol for the speech itself.

Everybody was quite helpful, and I didn’t feel much of a need to go to the White House to put pressure on any of the other Cabinet members to do anything. They all bought into it. They were happy to be part of it. We actually had something we called the Trade Cabinet that would meet periodically in the Roosevelt Room, particularly around TPA [Trade Promotion Authority] and TPP, and they were all very happy to be part of it.

So at this point, Caroline [Atkinson] is in your old seat, managing that stuff from the White House. Are you guys talking every day? What’s the working relationship like there, particularly as you’re ramping up for TPP, which becomes such a dominant part of the second term?

We were talking periodically, but I’d say the reality—This will come across, perhaps, in the wrong way—When I moved from the White House to USTR, the coordination of trade policy also moved from the White House to USTR. It was clear that the President was willing to give me some autonomy and support, and was looking to me on those issues, so I just kept on doing it from there. Caroline understood that, and there wasn’t any real tension there or anything of that sort.

You’ve mentioned a couple of times going to the Hill. Can you talk about your relations with Congress? When you talk about going to the Hill, are you talking about formal hearings or more informal lobbying? Also, your relationship then with Leg. [Legislative] Affairs.

I would testify periodically, not that often, maybe two or three times a year. There was a budget testimony, there was a trade agenda hearing, and then there might be one other hearing on one issue or another, those three, both in the House and in the Senate.

But I was up there all the time. First it was over TPA, as we were lobbying for that. We created a war room out of the White House to work on that, and my staff was very much involved in that. I worked very closely with White House Leg. Affairs at the time, who worked with our Leg. Affairs and managed that campaign.

It got to be a joke, because I was up there all the time. I would park myself in the Cannon Tunnel, because in between votes you could see probably a third of Congress walk back and forth. I would buttonhole Members, walking with them to the floor and then walking back with another one, back to their offices. It got to the point where they would joke with me that they’d see me and try to cross the street to avoid having to talk to me again.

So there was that, and then there was a rather remarkable process that Nancy Pelosi organized around TPP. It was her effort to manage her caucus. She would have me come up on one chapter or another of TPP—maybe we do labor, environment, agriculture, IP, whatever it was—I’d come up oftentimes with the other Cabinet member or sub-Cabinet member that was relevant. It was in the SCIF [Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility] of the Capitol, which is where the documents were also kept, so that Members of Congress could look at the documents and then—

For the lay audience, lay out what a SCIF is, Mike.

Yes, a SCIF is a Special Compartmentalized Information Facility. It’s a special locked room with alarms where you can keep classified information.

Thank you.

She would invite whoever wanted to come from the Democratic caucus. Sometimes we’d get 50 Members; sometimes it would only be half a dozen Members. It tended to be the opponents within the caucus, so you’d always get [Sander] Sandy Levin. You might get Rosa DeLauro. You might get [Janice] Jan Schakowsky. It tended not to be the trade-friendly members of the Democratic caucus, but that was fine.

Pelosi would come and at least open it up. Usually she would stay, but she would at least open it up. It was kind of remarkable. First, she would whisper to me, “There’s a special place in heaven for you [laughter] for doing this.”

Oftentimes it was quite hostile, and my fellow Cabinet members were not quite used to this. Trade is rough-and-tumble—You expect to be attacked, particularly by your own party—but Vilsack came with me a couple of times, and he was like, “I can’t believe the way they treat you.”

He had been an elected official in his life.

He’d been an elected official. He’d been Governor, right? [laughter] Long-standing Cabinet member. He obviously had been up on the Hill. He ran for President. He was not averse to the rough-and-tumble of politics, but at times it would be people up there calling me a liar, and yelling at me, and lots of misinformation.

My job was to calmly try to lay out what was in TPP. That was a little bit indicative of why the politics were so sour on this: there was unwillingness, really, to look at it on its merits. People had already written it off and were looking for excuses to be opposed to it.

My favorite moment—I was thinking about Trumka this week, with his passing—At one point, I went with Tom Perez. We had a couple of sessions where we presented what we were negotiating, because this was before it was concluded. We were presenting what we were negotiating on the labor front. And I purposefully presented only 80 percent of what we were asking for, because I knew if I presented 100 percent and we got anything less than that, they would say it was a failure. So I presented 80 percent, and they all said, “This is ridiculous. You’re never going to get this. You’re joking with us. This is not real.”

I would say, “Well, here’s the text. You can look at it. You don’t have to believe me; you can read it.” They were like, “You’re never going to get that. I don’t know why you’re wasting our time.” And we got more than that. I came back with 95 percent. Sandy Levin started laughing. Jan Schakowsky couldn’t believe it.

By the way, I had the same conversation separately in my office, and in their offices, with all of our labor leaders: Trumka, Mary Kay [Henry], Leo Gerard, Lee Saunders. The President asked me to go to them individually and brief them on what we were doing on labor. Again, Trumka said, “This would be a game changer if you were to get this,” and then went out and criticized it and condemned it.

This is all in late 2012?

No, this is later. This is when I’m USTR.

Oh, USTR. Late 2013?

This was while we were pursuing a vote on TPA. TPA was broadly seen as a substitute vote for TPP, so, because we were negotiating TPP at the same time—It wasn’t done yet; this was all the first half of 2015—going up there every couple of weeks for another session in the SCIF, calling in the labor leaders or going to their offices, showing them the text and lobbying for the TPA vote, which didn’t happen until June of 2015.

These are, you said, primarily Democrats, obviously, if it’s the Nancy Pelosi–led caucus. Explain a little bit, for history purposes—We know these names; we know where these people are from; we know their constituencies and their stakeholders, but others may not be so familiar in the future. It’s a fascinating conversation about representation, about people in Congress representing the people who voted for them, perhaps sometimes to the detriment of the country as a whole.

Yes—or not, as the case may be. What was happening, what was interesting, is that if you follow Pew or some of the other longitudinal polling, you will see that over this period of time support for free trade was declining among Republicans, rising among Democrats, declining among the middle-aged and older, rising among young people. By the time TPP was done, more than 70 percent of the American public supported international trade. The ferocity of the opposition—of the remaining 28 percent—swamped the level of support of the pro-trade folks. That’s the challenge.

To be fair, there was also an institutional element to this: labor unions were against it. They have a strong voice, because they’re well organized. As a result, their supporters in Congress—whether the people in their constituencies actually support trade—still came out against the agreement.

When I was traveling around the country, I would go to meet with local labor councils, and when I went through what was in the agreement with them, they said, “You must be lying, because we’re being told it’s a bad agreement, and if what you say is in it, it sounds like a pretty good agreement.” I would say, “You can read it.” This is after it was done. It was public.

But the labor union leadership had already decided to be against it, and, as a result, their supporters in Congress were against it, and there was very little that could be done substantively to move them. Frankly, looking introspectively, I was of the mistaken belief that we could win this argument on the substance.

Mike, as a reader of oral histories, I’m finding that thoughtful reflections on what happened during a period are as helpful and as important as the blow-by-blow timeline, and both are helpful. So what I’d love to ask you now, before going back to the timeline, is, to build on what you said at the start of this process: did you have a theory of the case for a Democratic President for how to move forward on this? You admitted that you had gotten something wrong. What did you have right about it, and what did you have wrong?

First of all, remember that in Congress, both houses were controlled by Republicans. The President was quite pragmatic about this all. I would go back to him periodically and say, “Democrats want us to do X. If we do X, we’re going to lose a bunch of Republican votes.” He would say, “Well, we need a majority, and even if you do X, you’re not going to get a huge number of Democrat votes.”

What was clear was there was a group of pro-trade Democrats, largely called the Blue Dogs, the Blue Dogs and the New Dems. You had to very much understand what they needed in order to say yes, because they were open to saying yes, but they all had issues. We spent a lot of time with them on—These were the 28 who voted for TPA; we were hoping to get even more for TPP, but—Understanding what would create the environment where they could vote yes was very important.

There were the Republicans who, at least back then, were largely being driven by business community constituencies, so I went through every industry, every agricultural product, to try to make sure we got every single one of them to sign off, either to be enthusiastic or to at least not be opposed. I can say a little bit more about that.

The idea was if you got that Republican group—who were already inclined to vote for free trade, but wanted to make sure their dairy interests or their textile interests or whatever were taken care of—that would form the basis. Trade agreements had always passed with virtually all Republican votes and a critical mass of Democrats. Republicans were not enough. Even CAFTA—that’s the Central America Free Trade Agreement—had 15 Democrats that were necessary to get it through to a high point of Korea, which I think had 70 Democrats. It was somewhere between 15 and 70 Democrats you needed to get anything passed. You were always going to lose a few Republicans who were of the more populist sort. There was always some constituency. But you’d end up getting 90 percent of Republicans. You needed 10 percent or 15 percent of the Democrats to get any trade agreement through. That was his theory of the case.

So when Jan Schakowsky or Mark Pocan, or one of the Democrats who have never voted for a trade agreement, would say, “You have to get X in TPP,” we knew that if we got X, they would still never vote for it. It was always trying to bridge how to keep the Republicans, how do you make things comfortable for the New Dems, and how do you try to neutralize the opposition as much as possible by at least eliminating things that were irritants to them.

On the Republican side, or on the business side, I viewed TPP—Think about American tariffs, American protectionism. We have five areas where we have high tariffs: textiles, footwear, trucks, sugar, and dairy. Those are the five major sectors where we have protections. I got the big three to be OK: I got sugar to be OK. I got dairy to be OK. I got textiles to be OK. And I got virtually all of footwear to be OK. I reached agreement with New Balance, and then they, frankly, went back on the agreement and screwed me, which hurt me with Angus King in Maine. But the rest of the footwear industry came along with me, so I got all five of the groups to either be enthusiastic or supportive of the agreement.

The only major industry group we did not get was pharmaceuticals, and it was the debate over intellectual property rights. If there’s one group I blame for the delay in the negotiation, it’s that group. At the end of the day, we gave them a choice. Their focus was the fact that in U.S. law there’s something called data exclusivity for biologics. This is the cutting edge of pharmaceuticals: 12 years of data exclusivity for biologics. It’s different from a patent—on top of a patent—and it gives them time to, in their view, fully monetize their investment in innovation.

They wanted to use the trade agreements to try to get 12 years in other countries. No other country in the world has 12 years. Europe has 10. Canada has 10 or 11. Japan had 10, so in terms of TPP, Canada and Japan were in the neighborhood. None of the other countries had any protection. But they insisted on us getting 12 years. This was Senator Orrin Hatch, Chairman Orrin Hatch of the Finance Committee. This was his number-one priority.

There was no chance we were going to get that, so we negotiated for years. We got something that, in my view, was eight years. It was slightly different than eight years; it was five years, plus three years of equivalence through some measure. Pharma kept on fighting, kept on fighting. At the end of the day, what they were worried about was if we agreed to something less than 12 years, it would undermine their ability to keep 12 years in the United States.

They didn’t really care about whether Peru had 12 years, or whether Malaysia had 12 years; they just wanted to make sure there was nothing that could be used to reduce 12 years in the United States. We repeatedly gave them a choice, saying, “Well, why don’t we be silent on this? If you’re worried about us agreeing to five years, or eight years, then we’ll just be silent, and there’ll be no prejudging of the U.S. system.” But they continued to press.

Finally, at the very end, REDACTEDTEXT, CEO [chief executive officer] of REDACTEDTEXT, who was the ringleader, when he saw that TPP was going to go down because of their delay, called and said, “Why don’t you drop us altogether?” It was way too late. This was after we had negotiated. It was just way too late.

Interestingly, of course, in the USMCA [United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement], negotiated by the Trump administration, there’s zero protection for them. And they rolled over. They did not oppose it. But they and REDACTEDTEXT did more to delay the conclusion of TPP over this one provision—And it became a highly politicized provision in these other countries, because it goes, in their view, to what’s the cost of medicine, what’s the access to lifesaving medicines.

I spent a lot of time in Peru and in Malaysia with the Cabinet there, with their health ministers, trying to explain why this was important and why this compromise we reached around eight years could still allow them to get access to lifesaving medicines without having to adopt completely the U.S. set of protections.

My main industry failure was not getting pharma over the line. Of course, on the other side—and this is a good case for the New Dems—the New Dems didn’t want us to do 12 years, because they thought that was too high, that it would raise the cost of medicines in developing countries, so they got quite comfortable with the compromise that we reached. But at the end of the day, we could never get pharma and Orrin Hatch to sign off. That was the Republicans.

The New Dems cared about that. They wanted reasonable access to medicines. They wanted good, strong environmental provisions, and they got comfortable with those. They wanted good labor provisions, which they got comfortable with. I felt good about all that.

Then, on the left of the Democratic Party, the labor unions were dead set against it, so we couldn’t make any progress there. With a lot of the environmental groups, interestingly, we had really constructive relations. A number of them were prepared to endorse it. Some did, but for a number of them, at the end of the day, their boards would not let them endorse it, even though they had basically written the provisions. We had negotiated the provisions they had asked us to negotiate. Their board would not let them endorse it for other political reasons: for affinity with labor, or other progressive politics reasons.

That’s an incredibly eloquent description of the strategy of putting together the coalition. Help us by taking a half step back to why, for President Obama, this was a priority. A headline of an article written about your time as U.S. Trade Representative is from CNN: “Left: Obama was great, except on trade.”

Was he a New Democrat on trade, or, in your view or his view, how did this fit into his view of what a Democratic President should be?

We were determined to make this the most progressive trade agreement in history. I even wrote an article about that for the left-leaning Democracy Journal, which I was very proud of, all the ways in which this was more progressive than anything else. I don’t view him as a DLC [Democratic Leadership Council] New Democrat. I view him as a progressive who also understood the strategic benefit of engagement in TPP.

He was trying to reconcile those two things. As we started to be more and more explicit about, this was, in part, an effort to create an alternative beachhead in the Asia Pacific vis-á-vis China. We weren’t prepared to say it was anti-China. It was an alternative to China. It was a way that other countries in the region could use us to be a counterweight to China: by being part of this, they could create an alternative set of rules of the road. He wanted it to be as progressive a trade agreement as there had ever been in history, and I think it was.

Now, by the way, USMCA has taken a few more steps since then and gone further in ways that were absolutely clear the Republican Congress would not let us have done, but they let Trump do: dropping certain provisions on investment protections, dropping protections of intellectual property rights, taking further actions on labor enforcement—all of which we were inclined to do, but the clear message we got from REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT was, “We will not move TPP if you do those things.” Of course, then they totally flipped. But that’s politics.

That’s where, again, I point to my own naïveté, thinking, OK, if you can check the box of every industry, if you’ve satisfied the New Dems that you need to cross the aisle, this is going to get done. I did not fully appreciate both the impact that labor—that some would have—on the left, and the declining support for international engagement that we were seeing in the mainstream Republican Party on the right.

That’s a long answer to your question, but I think it’s that Obama was progressive in his inclination, wanted to make sure everything we were doing was as progressive as possible. He was pragmatic in terms of saying, “We’re dealing with a Republican Congress, and I know how to count votes, and we can’t do a bunch of things that are just going to alienate the votes that we need.”

This whole thing was critically important geo-strategically, geo-economically, because of the importance of the Asia Pacific to the United States, and the rise of China. The example I’ll give, which is interesting right now, is the left wanted something in TPP on climate change. The Republicans said, “If you mention the word ‘climate change,’ you mention it anywhere in the agreement, you will lose 25 votes, 30 votes.”

We knew there were not 30 Democratic votes that would move over just for the mention of the words “climate change.” That’s all they wanted—they just wanted the mention of it—but it was a zero-sum question. I took it to the President, and he was like, “If we’re not going to do something meaningful on climate change, and we’re going to lose 25 or 30 votes of Republicans by mentioning it, then it doesn’t make sense.” So that’s where his pragmatism came in, whatever his natural inclination was.

How did the arguments about China play in the Democratic caucus, people either on the fence or people in the labor movement instinctively opposed to a trade agreement, but for whom China is the great bugbear both in material and psychic terms?

It’s important first to roll back the clock seven years or so. China was certainly front of mind for a lot of people then. Right now, the degree of bipartisan preoccupation with China—It wasn’t quite as strong back then as it is now, but it was strong. Among the Democrats, folks got it. In fact, that was one of the things that the New Dem/Blue Dog group embraced: that they could defend their position—including vis-á-vis labor, in their districts—by saying, “This is an important offset to China.” They felt comfortable doing that, but it was not enough to bring labor across the board.

By the way, it was interesting: the 28 brave Democrats who voted for TPA—and the President, by the way, and his political director, David Simas, and others conveyed to them that the President would have their back, and he did. He wanted to make sure they knew they weren’t out there on a limb all by themselves.

I went back later. I had a meeting with the New Dems. It might have been after I left government altogether. A number of them said it was the best vote they took. It was a really hard vote, but it was the best vote. REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

Labor was fine with them. None of them lost their seats because of this. They all maintained their seats, they all survived, and many of them looked back and articulated to me that they thought it was one of the best votes they took. I meant 28, not 98. We needed 98 of them to be able to do some of the other things we would like to have done.

OK, so you have this general framework. You’ve begun the consultation process internally, in the states, about where to go. Walk us through your theory of the case of the negotiation with the other partners. You’re traveling and listening, traveling and talking, and then starting to put things on the table. What jumps out as your starting point and your early miles in the marathon?

The first thing we did was call a Ministerial. I wanted to get all the ministers together. We did it in Brunei in August or September of 2013. A couple of funny things about it: first of all, it was during sequester, and all the agencies were under a lot of budgeting pressure. USTR is a small agency. It doesn’t have programs; all it has is people and travel, and we didn’t want to fire people, so we had to cut back on travel expenses.

There’s this funny moment at the end of the Ministerial where we all go to the airport. To get home from Brunei, you have to take three eight-hour flights: Brunei to Dubai, Dubai to London, London to Washington, something like that. We get to the airport. All the ministers go to business class. The U.S. delegation and I go to steerage, to economy class, because that was the only way. We didn’t have money to fly business class. The other ministers were freaked out by this. They kept coming back to economy class saying, “What’s going on? You’re going to fly 24 hours on a plane in economy?” That was our only choice, because we didn’t have any money. Later, when the budget got a little bit more generous, I was able to fly in the front of a plane again for long flights, but not early on.

We got to Brunei. The negotiations had been going on for several years by that time—five years more or less—and I decided what I would do is announce that we were in the endgame, just announce it, because no real negotiation toward a resolution of the outstanding issues was going to happen until people thought we were in the endgame.

It became a debate within my team, and it became a debate with the other ministers because they had their own politics to manage back home, and very few of them had done any of the groundwork back home to suggest to people that we were almost at the end. Of course, we were still two years away from being done, but I felt like if we didn’t create that sense of urgency, we would never get it done.

My team put together a list of outstanding issues, and there were about a thousand issues, a little less than a thousand. Some were rules. Some were market access. Some were bilateral. Some affected everybody. Every time we got together with the ministers, and every time the chief negotiators got together on their own, we would nail down 60 rules here, 60 more, 100 more, 20 more, until it got done. We kept a running list of the issues that we needed to get done, and we said, “We’re at fewer than a thousand open issues; we’re in the endgame.” That created the dynamic that then led to the acceleration of negotiations and finishing it up in two years.

Did you have a principal partner? Without revealing details, but this will be so familiar to you because you worked so closely with Todd [Stern]: as we’ve talked with Todd about the Paris Accord, obviously China is a key partner, but then there are the Europeans and others. But the China relationship was unique in that relationship and it had to be core to the negotiating strategy. Similar here, is there someone that you’re looking to as your essential: this will not happen unless X is part of the game? Is it Japan?

Yes.

Talk it through.

When I became USTR, I believe there were nine members of TPP. Japan and Mexico and Canada had not yet joined. We should check that. I can’t remember exactly when Japan joined, but Brunei may have been their first meeting. I don’t think they were there when I first became U.S. Chair.

We had a rule in TPP that if new members joined, they couldn’t reopen old issues. They had to join on the basis of whatever had been agreed upon at that point. There were lots of unresolved issues they could fully play a role in, but they weren’t allowed to open old issues, so there was a race to finish certain issues before Japan joined, because we knew they would be a problem on those issues. We raced to get a few of these issues done, and then Japan joined.

By the way, we did the same thing with Canada and Mexico a year later, as I recall.

It looks like it’s probably in 2014.

I guess that’s right. It goes to your question, because once Japan joined, it changed the dynamic. First of all, it became a lot more important. A much bigger part of the global economy was going to be covered. And for the other members of TPP, it changed the dynamic, because none of them have the negotiating clout to negotiate with Japan. None of them had been able to have a meaningful free trade agreement with Japan. And if TPP was now offering that opportunity—because the U.S. was going to be the battering ram to open the Japanese market, and they would ride on our coattails—that also gave us a lot more capital with these other countries.

Why does a country like Peru or Chile, who already has a free trade agreement with us—They’re not going to get any more access to the U.S. market; they already have full access to the U.S. market—why are they going to agree to higher standards on anything: labor, environment, intellectual property rights, investment, et cetera? Well, the trade-off is they’ll agree to those higher standards and go through the political challenge of getting those higher standards through their Parliaments, Congresses, if they can show the value they got in terms of market access to other countries, principal among them Japan.

So getting Japan in was critical from the importance of TPP, from the significance of it as a geopolitical mechanism vis-á-vis China in the Asia Pacific, and in terms of the negotiation dynamic with the other countries, who now saw real market access value in the negotiation. Peru could now get access to Malaysia, but there’s only so much Peru’s going to sell to Malaysia. If Peru can get access for agriculture to Japan, it’s a game changer for them, and that created a very interesting dynamic.

The President is involved in these conversations, at least from the timeline, right? He’s meeting with the Japanese Prime Minister, making the case. There are internal debates within Japan from various sectors about whether it’s good or bad. As we talked about in your first set of interviews, his own background growing up, starting in Hawaii, partly in Asia—Can you talk a little bit about his own perspective on Japan, the Japanese, their role in Asia, their role vis-á-vis China? What is his take on these players who are so major in the conversation?

He remembered the whole period of the late ’80s and ’90s when Japan looked like it was going to become the dominant economy, and there was all sorts of anti-Japanese feeling in the United States about the competition with Japan and fairness. He appreciated how Prime Minister [Shinzo] Abe laid this out as he had three arrows in his quiver, and this was the third arrow. The third arrow of TPP would help drive domestic economic reform, and that in itself was good for our bilateral relationship, because Abe had an economic reform agenda that would further normalize the relationship between the U.S. and Japan. Japan was an important partner vis-á-vis China in the region, so I think he very much appreciated both the economic and the geopolitical significance of Japan entering and using TPP as a form of gaiatsu, of foreign pressure, on economic reform in Japan itself.

He was very much directly involved. We didn’t go and lobby Japan to join. Japan came to us and the other TPP countries. This was part of Abe’s initiative, and really it has marked a transformation of the role of Japan in international trade ever since. Japan’s played a much more active, leading role in trade liberalization, in WTO [World Trade Organization] reform than they ever had before. It was really Abe who started that, with TPP.

So he was involved at the start, and then, of course, as the negotiations went on, he was very much involved at the end, trying to resolve the last few issues during a state visit to Japan, which must have been in 2015. We were trying to, again, mostly resolve agriculture issues, and it became clear that these were only going to be resolved by the Prime Minister, that my counterpart, Akira Amari, couldn’t do it without further political cover.

You’ve characterized, quite elegantly, how TPP was a priority for Obama as a pragmatic progressive Democrat, particularly vis-á-vis China. As you’ve just laid it out, domestic reform is one of the things driving Abe. How explicit are the Japanese being about China as a reason or a concern in their own strategy around trade and TPP?

It was certainly there. Again, looking back now we see this as being an obvious thing. At the time it was part of Abe’s calculation—He talked a little bit about it—but it was not front and center as a thing. There was a little bit of reluctance back then to talk about TPP, even within our foreign policy community, as being directed at China, or because of China. We had to dance around it a little bit. We were very careful with our language about it.

Japan was very much in the same position. It was there; they saw the strategic value of it vis-á-vis China. Even more than us, they understood how important it was for the U.S. to be paired with them and other likeminded countries in the region, vis-á-vis China. But they weren’t going out and banging the drum that this was directed against China. That would have been very un-Asian, so to speak, for them to be so explicit about it.

This was early in the days of Xi Jinping’s rule. Do you remember whether an assessment of Xi affected thoughts and strategy around this?

I’m sure we did not have the impression back then that we have now about President Xi taking China backward on a bunch of these reform measures. Hu Jintao had been viewed as an interim, transitional figure. He was not as much of a reformer as Jiang Zemin.

Xi Jinping was known to the President and the Vice President. The Vice President at the time, [Joseph R.] Biden [Jr.], had traveled with him extensively in the United States and in China, on a Vice President–to–Vice President level. They knew each other. Xi Jinping had spent—I don’t think it was a year, but it was some period of time—in Kansas on a farm, during a formative part of his life, so I don’t think people viewed him as, OK, now we’re going back to Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji and the period of great reform, but I don’t think there was an assessment at that point that things were going to go backward.

You raised Vice President Biden in this context. In the early stages of this, how engaged or interested is he? It’s not yet past the midterms, where people are announcing their Presidential ambitions. I don’t think yet—as I put my own timeline together—President Obama has had his conversation with Vice President Biden, indicating that he thinks Hillary Clinton should be encouraged to run. Are you having conversations with the Vice President’s office? Are they engaged in this deeply? What’s their level of connection to all of this?

I would say he was engaged sporadically. For example, I mentioned that of the five areas of protectionism, one of them was trucks. I remember him meeting with the Michigan delegation. John Dingell [Jr.] came down to the White House—to the Roosevelt Room, with the rest of the delegation from Michigan—to meet on TPP.

The Vice President led the meeting and explained to Dingell that we had negotiated a 30-year phaseout of tariffs, which is unheard of. Most trade agreements don’t go beyond five years. Dingell started laughing, saying, “30 years? I’m fine with that.” That was the Vice President with his credibility with labor, with Michigan, with working-class constituents. He played that kind of role.

He would play a role periodically getting on the phone with foreign leaders on some of these outstanding issues so that the President didn’t have to do it. For example, we did a bunch of work with him calling the President of Mexico, because he chaired a U.S.-Mexico commission that the rest of us on the Cabinet served on. He was in charge of managing that relationship, and he dealt with [Enrique] Peña Nieto on some labor issues we were negotiating.

In some of the conversations, I’d go in with his staff; we’d brief him in his office before the phone call. He’d have a memo. Basically, he never fully bought into the economic estimates. He always thought, Oh, these are always highly exaggerated; we don’t know whether these are really going to create that many jobs or increase exports by that much. But he totally bought into, and appreciated, and actually did a better job than whatever we staffed him to say, on the geopolitical, the strategic objectives.

You’d give him a memo, go in and talk him through it. He’d cross out a bunch of it, write his own notes, and then get on the phone with whomever he was supposed to call and do a much better job—and a much more authentic job, for him—than whatever we prepared for him, because he could convey that this was absolutely critical from a geopolitical and strategic perspective, and it was going to, of course, improve the economics and all the rest. His emphasis was really on the geopolitical piece of it.

It sounds like the way that you’re engaging him—using him, if you will—is in the congressional work. You’re playing to his strength in Congress, or beyond?

Both. Congressional work, but also we’d put him on the phone with foreign leaders and he would help negotiate. When we went down to Mexico, I remember going with him on a couple of these—I can’t remember what they called the commission, sort of a binational commission that he chaired—and beyond whatever was on the agenda of the commission, when he went in to go have the bilateral with the President, he would bring the list of TPP issues in with him and push on that agenda. He was good at that, too.

You’re going through the negotiations. The list is coming down from a thousand and drawing down. Do you remember key moments, either in the working through of the list or the working through of the negotiating partners’ significant milestones? What jumped out at you as—again, sticking with the marathon metaphor—key mile markers, heartbreak hills, places where you’re either struggling or cruising, and you feel like, Oh, this is hard, or Boy, that suddenly is a breakthrough?

A few of them. To answer your previous question as well, reaching the agriculture agreement with Japan was critical, because Japan wouldn’t negotiate with any of the other parties until they were done with us. And none of the other parties could get anything from Japan until we had created an opening with them. That was a long, painful process. Can I tell you a few anecdotes?

Always great.

My counterpart was a man named [Akira] Amari, who was a leading LDP [Liberal Democratic Party] figure, very good, very smart. Japan has joined TPP. Later that year—must be October, November—I go to Tokyo. It’s about two weeks after Caroline Kennedy has arrived as Ambassador. She’s a total rock star, and her arrival in Japan—parades in the street, people lining the street and throwing flowers at her—it could not have been a warmer welcoming.

Caroline was fantastic as Ambassador. I arrive there about two weeks after she gets there. She’s had this wonderful couple of weeks. We’re scheduled to meet with Amari and his delegation for lunch at the Okura Hotel, across the street from the Embassy. I think it’s a Sunday. We get to the restaurant. It was a private room. We can see the bento boxes laid out in the hallway. They haven’t brought it in to us yet because we’re starting with the negotiation.

In the previous 48 hours, Amari has sent a proposal on agriculture, which is totally a joke. It’s nothing. He comes in, loaded for bear, and says, “That proposal is it. It’s take it or leave it. There’s no negotiation.”

Now, this is only a few months after Japan has joined the TPP, so of course there’s going to be a negotiation, and he knows that, but he was so hot on this. I gently pushed back, saying, “Why don’t we start talking it through? Let’s go through line by line, category by category, and we can share with you what our perspective is about what we’re going to need to make this work.” He said, “No, it’s take it or leave it,” and he starts yelling and screaming at me. Caroline is sitting next to me and thinking, What the hell have I gotten myself into? [laughter] The honeymoon is clearly over. Two weeks, that’s it.

Did you know her at all at this point?

I had met her during the transition in ’08, because there was an interest in trying to bring her into the administration back then. I was in New York, and she’d come to meet with me, but nothing exactly worked out; she did something in New York City instead. She was clearly a favorite of the administration, so she was on everyone’s radar screen. But I didn’t know her well. I may have met her a couple times before.

Amari and his delegation storm out, with no lunch, and we go back across the street and try to debrief and figure out what to do next.

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

That was my immediate reaction.

“Take it or leave it, this is our first proposal”—It was completely inappropriate, and then to blow up like that and to storm out. REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT, we got back going again, and there was a much more—It was still very difficult, but—a normal relationship.

Two more stories about that. I would go back to Tokyo regularly to meet with him, and you know how this works, Bill: you don’t get really going until about 11:30, midnight in the negotiations. We’d be at his office, and I would be there all night, negotiating. REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

There’s an infamous scene, at least in my own mind, where I walk into the Ministry. All the press is there. There are probably 50 cameras and reporters. You know the Japanese paparazzi. It’s 11 at night, and I’m bringing in a carton of Starbucks [laughter] to signify that we’re there for the night and we expect him to be up with us.

Loaded symbolism on trade in so many ways.

[laughs] Exactly. Last story about him is at some point he’s back in Washington, and we have another one of these confrontations where we’ve laid out lunch in the hallway at the USTR building. He comes in. It wasn’t over agriculture—It was over some rules of origin or something. We’re clearly not going to make progress. He storms out, not yelling and screaming, just leaves. Negotiations are over for this round. We still don’t have lunch. It became a standing joke that we were never going to be able to have lunch together until the negotiation was fully over. When the negotiation was fully over, we finally had lunch together. He had stormed out once, and basically we had stormed out the other time, and that was it.

Anyway, Japan was certainly one important milestone. It took a long time, but once that got done, then every other country could negotiate with Japan, and could negotiate with us over the remaining agriculture issues, once they knew what they were getting. That was what cleaned things up there at the end. That was one set of milestones.

Another very important one was the whole set of issues around labor and Vietnam—and labor and Mexico, but to a certain degree less. I often tell people, “If you’re going to read one trade agreement this year, read the 12-page Vietnam Labor Action Plan attached to TPP.”

We spent a lot of time understanding the role of their state-run, or party-run, labor union, which predates the Communist Party in Vietnam. They call it a “founding father institution.” It predates the whole notion of Vietnam as a country and the Communist Party. It’s held in very high regard. This labor union will pay for your funeral. It will put on birthday parties for your children. It will do all sorts of things for you, except industrial relations. [laughter] It’s on the side of the state-owned company if there’s a labor dispute.

We got them to negotiate a series of provisions that would allow the creation of independent labor unions that could raise their own dues, elect their own leaders, associate with other international labor unions like the AFL-CIO [American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations], go on strike—all of which was not possible in the current situation.

This went all the way up to the Chairman of the Communist Party, to the President of the country, the Prime Minister, as well as the labor union heads. There wasn’t any animosity. It was really a mutual education effort of us understanding what role their labor union played, and us convincing them that they were having all of these wildcat strikes, illegal strikes where the workers would just sit down outside the fence of the factory, refuse to go in. The head of the factory would go out to the fence, and they would exchange hand signals, and renegotiate wages or days off, or whatever was in dispute, and then they would come back in. There was no union. It was just by strike. They were having something like 10,000 of these a year, 10,000 strikes.

Completely separate from the negotiations you guys were doing? Just over local stuff?

Their view was, We have a problem. We have a problem. We’re not actually managing our labor issues. And us convincing them that they could create an independent union that could be associated with the AFL-CIO—and this is what I told [Richard] Trumka; this is what he thought was such a game changer, notwithstanding the fact that he came out against the agreement. It was one or the few remaining Communist-country, single-labor-union, single-labor-market kinds of instances, and we were going to change it. I viewed that as quite important.

Similarly, with Mexico, there were three big issues that labor wanted us to negotiate, and we did. They weren’t in the agreement; they were a condition of the agreement going into place. It involved a constitutional change. It involved changes to something like fake contracts that they would negotiate. It involved a change to their dispute settlement over labor issues. Again, it was very painful for the Mexicans to do. They agreed to do it. That’s what became USMCA, by the way. Those same provisions are the ones that Trump did and got credit for. Those two parts of the labor piece were absolutely critical.

Those were the ones that mattered most to me: getting the Japan ag piece, in particular, resolved, which then unblocked the rest of the negotiation; and the labor piece for Vietnam and Mexico.

We got to Atlanta, which was the final negotiation, in October 2015. My Australian counterpart, a great guy named Andrew Robb, said, “Well, the text is about 95 percent done, which means we’re halfway there.” It was just an indication, of course, that while the thousand issues list was now down to about 25 issues, those were, by definition, the hardest 25 issues to resolve, and, again, took five nights up, 24/7. We literally did not sleep for five nights. That’s not true: I slept eight hours over five nights to ultimately get it done.

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT. We just had to keep people there until it was done. It got done 48 hours longer than we expected, but it got done.

And two days later Hillary Clinton comes out with her opposition.

Was it two days?

The timeline here says on the 5th of October you secured the agreement, and on the 7th she comes out against TPP.

Is that right? I don’t remember it being that soon thereafter. We should go back and take a look at what she said on the 7th, because there was a moment where she tried to have it both ways, and then Bernie [Sanders] pushed her to come out in full opposition.

For a while there it was like, I’m opposed to it in its current form. Then later on in the campaign, she was forced to come out and say it can’t be renegotiated; I’m against it now; I’m against it forever. That’s the one I remember, because renegotiating it is par for the course. Every President wants to take whatever the predecessor did and say it wasn’t enough and go a little bit further, and we fully expected her to do that. It was when she came out later and said, “Not now, not ever, not in any form.” I think that was more in the spring, but I could be wrong.

It’s a good time to take a five-minute break.

[BREAK]

Mike, the Hillary announcement is the beginning of the next chapter of this, which is the domestic politics demise. But I was thinking as you were talking through, particularly as I raised the climate change/Todd Stern example, there is this other negotiation going on at the same time that you had been deeply part of when you were in your old White House job.

You mentioned mentioning climate change in the negotiation and getting it dropped. Beyond that, are there any broader links between the two? You’re negotiating with some of the same countries, obviously, that are important to the climate agreement, but some, like China, are out of the agreement. Anything you want to reflect on about these two major multilateral conversations happening?

Yes. There wasn’t a lot of overlap, but there were these environmental provisions, which were not climate-specific. But in the context of COVID, I’ve often thought about the provision and the work we did on—

The whole idea was how to use trade tools to enforce multilateral environmental agreements, which tend not to have strong enforcement mechanisms. Applying tariffs as a tool for enforcing the convention on the international trade and endangered species sightings, which—One of the things we talked a lot about was things like the pangolin, and the trade of illegal animals in the wet markets of Asia, and how TPP was going to go after that, and getting Vietnam and Malaysia to agree that they’re going to stand up to the international trade of pangolin and other endangered species that show up often in these particularly Asian markets for medicinal or other purposes.

As the origins of COVID were debated, and people talked about, oh, gee, maybe it was a bat that bit a pangolin in a wet market in Wuhan, I thought, I wonder if anybody has made that connection, that TPP might have played a small role in trying to discourage such wet markets. REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT.

There wasn’t a lot of climate overlap, per se, but there was on this environmental side. Again, the environmental groups with whom we worked—the Nature Conservancy and World Wildlife Fund and Oceana and others—very much saw the value of bringing real enforcement into the environmental area. That was important to people like Congressman Earl Blumenauer and others among those New Dems who cared a lot about the labor and environment piece.

I’m thinking about one other thing that’s now starting to come up again, which is more of a WTO issue. It’s the border adjustment tax for carbon and things like that, which is where these two things intersect. It makes me wonder, from your perspective, as we go forward in talking about the politics of TPP, where is a good point to talk both about WTO and T-TIP, as well as bilateral things that you’re negotiating in the meantime, before we go into the political descent of TPP? As you think about your time in office, how do you think about these things stacking up with one another?

Right. As you know, in addition to TPP we had T-TIP going on with the European Union; we had TISA, which is the Trade International Services Agreement, which is sort of a subset of the WTO countries. We were negotiating an International Technology Agreement, ITA, international technology products, and Environmental Goods Agreement.

We got the ITA done. I can talk about T-TIP. The EGA, the Environmental Goods Agreement, we almost got done. It literally was done at the end of the Obama administration, and it came down to a conflict between China and the EU over bicycles. China, not surprisingly, wanted free trade in bicycles, and the EU was determined to protect its East European bicycle manufacturers. I have had this conversation with Cecilia Malmström, who was my EU counterpart at the time. I think she regrets the fact that the EU stood in the way of a major environmental agreement over East European bicycles, but that’s the way trade agreements go.

On T-TIP, and to answer your question about border adjustment taxes, it never really came up in TPP. None of the TPP countries were big on those issues. Europe was further along in its thinking on this. We never got to it in T-TIP, in part because we conveyed to them, again, that there was zero appetite in Congress for seeing trade and climate at that point brought together. That may well have evolved since then, but at least at that point there was no appetite in Congress for a trade agreement that would take on climate change. There’s still too much debate among the Republicans about the scientific basis of climate change, so we never really engaged with the Europeans in any serious way on that.

Before getting to the domestic politics, while you’re doing all of these TPP negotiations, you have these other things going on. Do they feel like a distraction to you from your main job of TPP, or does it feel like, no, my job is to watch all of this stuff at the same time?

I viewed it as part of the job. I was excited to have such a broad trade agenda to pursue, and they were quite different. In the European dynamic, you were dealing with 28 countries, but you were really dealing with Brussels, and the dynamic between Brussels and the 28 countries. I can tell you some stories about that, if you like. But the TPP was a retail negotiation. There was stuff we did at 12, but you really had to go around one by one to each country and work through the issues to get them comfortable with it.

What were your aspirations and hopes for TPP? Did you think you could get a negotiated agreement in the four years of an Obama second term? Was it to keep the bicycle pedaling, as they say in trade talks? You always have to be negotiating, because if you’re not negotiating, the bicycle tips over?

You’re asking about TPP or T-TIP?

T-TIP.

I thought we would get it done. This was an interesting thing for the President, too: T-TIP wasn’t really our idea. It was the Europeans’ idea. When we announced TPP, the Europeans misinterpreted what the pivot to Asia, or rebalance to Asia, meant. It didn’t mean rebalancing away from Europe. It meant rebalancing away from Afghanistan and Iraq, really. But the Europeans have a sizable chip on their shoulder vis-á-vis the United States, so their view was, Well, if you’re going to be focusing on the Asia Pacific, it means you’re not going to be transatlantic. José Barroso and Karel DeGucht, who was the Trade Commissioner at the time, lobbied quite hard for us to go into a free trade negotiation. If we could have free trade with Malaysia, how could we not have free trade with our transatlantic partners? That was their argument.

We went through that effort. We went through the study of it. We went through the launch of it. What became clear, though, is that while [Angela] Merkel and [David] Cameron and [Nicolas] Sarközy talked about how important this was at the time, none of them were willing to put political capital into it. Even Cameron and Merkel, who were probably the most outspoken—When I say “outspoken,” it means they would mention it once a year [laughter].

As a result, there was opposition—and we can now look back in retrospect and wonder whether the opposition was purely organic or might have been spurred on by manipulation of social media by outside forces—within Europe to T-TIP, partly because of anti-Americanism, partly because of some specific sensitivities around trade, things such as GMOs [genetically modified organisms] or chlorine-treated chicken and hormone-treated beef and things of that sort. Again, these were mostly unfounded fears, because those weren’t the positions we were negotiating on, so to speak, but the opposition got so much more momentum than the proponents.

It became a vicious circle where Merkel was reluctant to go out and create the political space to do T-TIP because the political space was shrinking, and it was more of a battle. I put a lot of fault at the feet of Merkel and Cameron and the other European leaders who never invested the political capital necessary to give T-TIP a chance.

Obama was sort of a reluctant participant. His view was there’s a huge strategic benefit to TPP. “I’m happy to do T-TIP, because there aren’t going to be a lot of the same concerns about low-wage labor and things like that, if the Europeans are into it. But we’re certainly not going to bend over backward to get T-TIP done if the Europeans themselves are not investing the effort.” That was a message he sent repeatedly to them: it was their idea, they were the ones who pushed for it, they were the ones who felt there was a strong rationale for it. We were happy to oblige, if they were willing to do their part. And they, at the end of the day, were not willing to do their part.

Then there’s the WTO. In trade policy, trade scholarship circles, there’s always this question of global multilateralism as opposed to bilateral or in both cases, regional agreements. Did you feel that at the time? Or maybe a better way to ask the question is had you written off the idea of completing the Doha Round at this point, which had been belabored for going on 15 years?

When Obama came in in 2009, in London, for the G20 [Group of 20], he was asked, “What are you going to do about the Doha Round?” He said, “I don’t know. We’ll have my team look at it. We’ll come back to you.” He came back that summer. We looked at it. We decided there was no way to get it done.

The world had changed. If you read the Doha document, it’s an astounding document. It basically says China should have no responsibilities to the international system because it’s a poor, developing country. That was in 2001. By 2009, that had already changed so much that there would be no political support for anything that looked like the Doha framework, where developed countries took on responsibilities that developing countries, including China, basically didn’t. They were free riders on the system.

So we made that case. Obama made that case repeatedly, at various summits. It took a couple of years for it to really sink in. We started using terms, not that we “killed” Doha, but we were “turning the page.” That was one phrase we used: “turn the page” on Doha. We didn’t close the book; we just turned the page.

We’re now on a different page, where we focused on things like trade facilitation, which was one piece of the Doha Round, but one that we thought we could get done, and then use the WTO for other purposes like environmental goods, information technology, other plurilateral agreements where there was more momentum to get it done.

So as these other regional agreements are going on, is anybody giving you pushback on that? The WTO itself? Any other countries that care more about the WTO? Any domestic constituencies that—?

No domestic constituency. There’s no domestic constituency here, really, for the WTO, to be frank. In Geneva, there’s a WTO ideology, and in some of the developing country capitals, and in Europe. Europe talks about multilateralism as an end in and of itself, so quietly they agreed with us; publicly, they would say, “Oh, gee, we’re still interested in seeing the Doha Round get done.” It was more of doffing their cap in the direction of developing countries than any real emphasis on getting it done, and they didn’t show any leadership to do so.

So, yes, there was a little bit of noise in the system. Roberto Azevêdo became the Director General of the WTO. He was quite pragmatic. His view was we should get done what could get done—and that looks like trade facilitation; it looks like some stuff on agricultural studies. We launched an e-commerce and a fisheries negotiation, which is still going on—but focus on pieces of Doha that could get done, as opposed to the overall agreement.

You’ve mentioned the Trade Promotion Authority several times. Could you go a little bit into the politics of that with the Hill? What’s in it for Congress? Why would they be supportive of this fast-tracking approaching?

Well, there’s a long history to it. It’s intended to embody what the respective responsibilities of the executive and Congress should be on trade. This version of the Trade Promotion Authority created all sorts of new procedures and consultations and reporting that made sure that Congress played an appropriate role in trade policy going forward.

The trade-off for that is they’re willing to give up their ability to amend it, and they’re willing to agree to a particular timetable, which, while it’s called “fast track,” is not at all fast. It’s a six-month timetable to consider a trade agreement when it’s done.

So it became a proxy vote for TPP. Some people opposed it or had a view on it just on the basis of what it meant for congressional prerogative. But most people who looked at it were in favor of it if they were in favor of TPP, and were against it if they were against TPP. One thing the USMCA pointed out during the Trump administration is that while that was negotiated under TPA, they didn’t use any of the TPA procedures.

It underscored that if you have political consensus among the House and Senate leadership, there are always ways of getting things done notwithstanding congressional procedure. You could have a closed rule in the House; you can “fill the tree” in the Senate, or have a rule in the Senate that doesn’t have any real amendments. All you need is real agreement by the leaders.

It’s unfortunate that we spent so much political capital on a procedural vote, because it’s a hard procedural vote. Democrats vote for this thing. They look like they’re pro-trade, but they’re not bringing back any benefits of a trade agreement; that’s a separate vote that happens later. It’s one reason why it’s hard to get broad-based support for it. We put on a full-court press. The President was involved. As I mentioned, there was a war room out of the White House. Leg. Affairs was very much involved. And ultimately we got the 28 Democrats we needed to get it over the line.

When you say the President is involved, as people look back and talk about his relations with Congress, they have criticism that he’s not schmoozing with them, he’s not playing golf with them, for reasons you so admirably explained in the first interview. What is his involvement like in pushing forward with this?

Oh, he was on the phone or meeting with Members regularly to get them over the line. I have to think through the exact timing, but there was a congressional picnic on the South Lawn of the White House where he was buttonholing Members of Congress. Actually, there was a last-minute, rather slightly unfortunate effort, where he went up to a baseball game to meet with Nancy Pelosi and other—It must have been a Nationals game. There was some special congressional thing at the baseball game, and he went up at the last minute to lobby them on TPA. It was a little bit unfortunate, because he was trying to get Pelosi to agree to move it, and I remember it being not entirely successful. It did not look great that the President was going up to beg her for something and it not working.

She ultimately did REDACTEDTEXT allow it to move forward REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT and it did pass.

While we’re on domestic politics, and we’ve mentioned Hillary Clinton’s turn on TPP, in that period of particularly 2015, I have two questions. One is we’ve also mentioned Vice President Biden, and, sadly, the two of you share a family tragedy of similar origins and results, which we know for him caused him not to run in 2016; that is, the loss of his son, [Joseph Robinette] Beau [Biden III], to cancer.

Did you have a preference between the two of them, or with Bernie Sanders, or any other Democrats at the time? Did you ever have an opportunity to speak to the Vice President about what your family had gone through?

We did that repeatedly. Earlier on, before Beau got sick, at the beginning of the administration, my first day in the White House, which, as we talked about, was a couple weeks after Jacob [Froman] died, he came up because he had lost his wife and his daughter, so the notion of losing family and grieving, and how you deal with it, was something he and I had repeated conversations about, from the beginning of the administration. Then when Beau got sick, we had a couple of other conversations about it, so, yes, we did, unfortunately, share that.

I loved Hillary as a candidate, and I thought she’d be a great President, and assumed she was going to be the candidate. I didn’t think that Biden would be putting himself forward at that point for it, so I was resigned and comfortable with that fact, notwithstanding her opposition to TPP. [laughter]

I’m so eager to go through the timeline of that fall of ’15 through the end of ’16, but, once again, Barbara put her finger on a great question here about Biden and his psychology, and him as a leader and a person. It’s funny to think back about that time period, and about where all of our thoughts about Joe Biden were, setting aside Beau and then bringing Beau into it.

I’m curious about your take on Biden up close and personal, when you were in the office at that time, as opposed to how we might think about him now, given everything that’s transpired in between: the four years of a Trump Presidency, his own candidacy, where he is now in the pandemic.

Can you erase the last four years from your memory and give us your sense—? You’ve given us some in terms of the negotiation, but did you ever look at Biden and think, He could be President tomorrow, and what that might look and feel like, back when he was Vice President?

Yes. I’m trying to remember back. I always thought that it was going to be Hillary. I’m not close enough; I wasn’t close enough at the time to Biden to know how seriously he was considering running ever again, let alone in 2016. We never talked about it. I didn’t have that kind of relationship with him.

But when Hillary stepped down from being Secretary of State, and she put her whole organization together, I just assumed she was going to be the Democratic nominee, and I guess I would have been somewhat surprised if Biden had decided, post-Beau’s passing, to throw his hat in the ring. I never seriously contemplated that at the time. I really thought it was Hillary’s.

Did the rise of Bernie Sanders, the strength of Bernie Sanders, surprise you?

Yes, I guess so. It surprised me in 2016; it surprised me even more in 2020, how he could appeal to the young. He was not the most obvious candidate to be getting the youth vote and have the “Bernie Bros” or whatever they’re called, the enthusiastic supporters that he managed to generate.

We were watching carefully, and saw that this rise of populism was real. We saw it on the left, and we saw it on the right. At the end of the day, in retrospect, we shouldn’t have been surprised, but yes, at the time I was a bit surprised—surprised also at how Hillary felt the need to respond to it, rightly or wrongly, whether she would have done better if she had not responded to it or whether she would have done worse if she didn’t. Certainly she felt the need at the time to respond to it.

Almost in the same way that we asked the question about key turning points in the negotiation, key milestones, there are labor leaders; there are Sanders and other members of the Democratic caucus from where he is intellectually, but him being clearly unique because he’s running for President. And then there’s an electorate out there. Do you remember, once the agreement was reached, thinking that there was still work to do with them and the sequencing of what that might look like? And/or was there a moment when you realized, I’ll never get them; they’re going to be against this no matter what we do?

That was my view, and I’ll come back to that in a second. When I look back, there are a several critical points in this whole thing. There was how long it took for the Obama administration to engage with trade in the first term, how long it took to ask for a Trade Promotion Authority, which I think was in January of 2014, and the Harry Reid reaction to that.

Harry Reid delayed it, and then Orrin Hatch sat on it, and his staff sat on it, for months and months. The issues around negotiating the text of TPA, which could have been done in a week or two, took eight months. I could never understand why he sat on it like that. Once we got it and were negotiating, Paul Ryan called me up and said, “Don’t close. Don’t close the negotiation.” Then, once we closed it, his view, and the view of others, was, Well, as soon as we get through some of these primaries and get rid of the anti-trade candidates for President in the Republican Party, as soon as [John] Jeb Bush emerges as our candidate, we’ll be able to move it forward.

We were ready to go in November of 2015, which was already late. But the Trump phenomenon had begun, and the Republicans were feeling, All right, we’ll get through January. We’ll get through Iowa and New Hampshire. It’ll be clear that the pro-trade end of the party is going to be winning, and then we’ll bring it up. And, of course, that never happened.

Again, I put this down to my own naïveté. I’ve since been told by some Republican strategists that the whole thing was they really liked TPP, but they wanted it to be a win for a Republican President, not for Obama, so they wanted to delay this until the next President.

We could have always forced it, but Congress can always turn it off. But we could have submitted it without the sign-off of the Republican leadership. They probably would have found a way not to take it up, but it would have forced the question. I see a bunch of timing errors, some on our part, Harry Reid, Orrin Hatch, Paul Ryan. There was a whole series of points where we could have gotten this done earlier and gotten it off the track before the Republican and the Democratic primaries heated up in such a way that made it impossible.

The Trump phenomenon, particularly as it relates to your day job. All of us were watching the Trump phenomenon, but what do you remember, and when do you remember remembering it? [laughter]

Let’s see, he called TPP the “rape of America.” He said it was negotiated by—I can’t remember whether he called us idiots or stupid, but some very attractive moniker like that. We were the canary in the coal mine, to a certain degree. It’s hard to feel sorry for yourself because he did so much damage to the country and the Constitution and the world and democratic principles, but I think trade was the first thing he did, pulling out of TPP three days into his administration. He attacked it in such a way during the campaign that it was a strong indication of where he thought his—

Had you ever met him in New York circles?

I met him once, literally in passing, long before, back when I was working in New York in the early 2000s, at a large event. He was part of the group that was there.

When did you start to think he might actually be a force in Republican politics? Was it just as his numbers remained high, or did you think it from the beginning?

I did not think it from the beginning. I remember being in Davos in January 2016. There was a regular lunch there that [Elizabeth] Lally Weymouth puts on, and somebody got up—I’m trying to remember who it was. This was January, prior to Iowa and New Hampshire. Somebody got up and said, “Donald Trump is going to be the Republican nominee.” Everyone was either aghast or laughed. This was only two weeks before Iowa. Some people had great foresight, but certainly at the time we largely unappreciated how much appeal he had.

Could I back up a little bit to that fall of 2015 and Brexit? Was that more of you beginning to see what was happening on the Hill, what might happen with Trump? Was that a surprise to you as it was to many?

It was. We knew it was going to be close, but we thought the “remainers” would win. Of course, it’s a different kind of populism, right? It was directed against Brussels and against giving up sovereignty. On the other hand, the British said, “We want to be independent of Brussels so we can have a more open, more liberal, more proactive trade policy, Big Britain,” and they’re trying to deliver on it. They’re out there negotiating lots of new free trade agreements that, they view, go even further than what the protectionist parties on the continent would allow them to do as part of the EU.

So, yes, it was tapping into some of the same sentiment, but when it came to trade, it was quite a different sentiment. It was pulling away to be more liberalizing on trade, not less.

Going back to Trump, the anti-China rhetoric now starts getting inflated. Now you’ve been at this for a few years, and Xi Jinping’s been at this for a few years. Do you remember in that period your own views about China starting to gel in a slightly harder place?

Yes, absolutely. We had seen less progress. Remember, at the same time we were doing this, I was negotiating a bilateral investment treaty with China, which was an effort to get at the structural reform issues. We had been making quite good progress. Wang Yang, who was a Vice Premier, personally took it on. It was allegedly important to Xi Jinping, and he sent the message that he wanted to use this process to get some reforms done domestically, so we took on a bunch of these issues. They made some progress internally in terms of reaching agreement as to what kinds of concessions they could offer us.

We made a lot of progress. There were two rules and one sector that were still the hard ones to finalize. We decided not to bring it to closure because we were in the middle of a Presidential campaign, and thought, This is going to get politicized. We’re going to let President Hillary Clinton finish it on her watch, which, again, shows how smart we were politically. But we were still making progress there.

Now, counter to that, there’s the last G20 of the Obama administration in China, and I was on that trip. It was a rough trip. It was rough physically, among other things. This is the trip where the Chinese security guards and the Secret Service almost got into a fight, where they tried to keep Susan Rice, who was National Security Advisor, out of the meeting by blocking her from entering the meeting. President Obama had to walk back out of the building to grab Susan, to pull her in, over the objection of the Chinese guards. Things were fraying a bit at the edges there.

There had been some pretty hard conversations about cybersecurity and cyberintrusions and things of that sort. But on the trade side, we were continuing to make progress on subsidies for state-owned enterprises, intellectual property rights, forced technology transfer, all the major structural issues—and then market access—which formed the basis of some of the things that Trump got in the first term, and formed the basis of some agreements that have still yet to be fully harvested, because they weren’t part of the phase one deal with China; they were put off to phase two. But we had already negotiated texts around many of them.

Do you attribute that to Xi Jinping, to Wang Yang, whose background is a little bit more liberal, or his reputation is more liberal?

That’s right. The message came down from Xi Jinping that this was a priority. And you could tell the Chinese were treating it as a priority because they would have hundreds of people involved in the negotiating process between the different departments and the agencies. Wang Yang was point on it, and Liu He, who, of course, is now Vice President. He was Vice Premier in the first term, during the Trump administration. They were in charge of running the process. Liu He would be negotiating with us, and then they would tee up issues that needed to be resolved between different departments for Wang Yang to convene.

I always thought the value of it—It was a bilateral investment treaty, which meant had we ever successfully finished it, it would have to go before the Senate for a two-thirds vote, which is highly unlikely on a China-related thing, but the value of it was less that. This is a fight that I have with Larry Summers all the time, by the way. It was not about whether it ever got approved by the Senate; it was the fact that they went through that internal process themselves to resolve the issues, and there was no going back on that. I continue to believe that is a good basis for dealing with these issues, but it needs someone to pick up the baton.

I want to come back to this at the end, after we get through the end of TPP, but just to put a bookmark down. You are uniquely placed to give us a view of Presidential powers and negotiating authority vis-á-vis Congress. We’ve already talked about TPA, but I don’t want to end the interview without getting your take on what the right relationship should be, or your reflections on the nature of the relationship.

But sticking with TPP a bit—because at least as the timeline indicates, but my own memory reminds me—you were still thinking about a lame-duck vote on this, regardless of the outcome of the election, and it ends up not going there. If you could, walk us through the timeline from the spring as Hillary’s views against the agreement harden, and as the rise of Trump becomes clearer suddenly to everybody in the world, through the fall and past the election, if you could.

We finished the negotiation in October 2015. The document was released a month later, fully vetted, legally scrubbed in all the language. It was ready to go. I used to carry around this one-pager that had the TPA timetables. And as every month went on, I would demonstrate how you could do it in less and less time, including a very ambitious version of it for the lame duck. It said over that ten-week period, you could get it done.

The theory was, yes, Hillary might have come out against it, but she was present at the creation of it. She was one of the prime motivators behind arguing for its strategic value. And with a wink and a nod—there’s only one President at a time—Obama would just get it done so that she didn’t have to deal with it, either before the election or during the lame duck.

The rise of Trump is what really changed that, because then we weren’t sure what we could count on in terms of Republican votes. We knew where our Democratic votes were. There weren’t that many, but we didn’t need that many; we just needed the bulk of the Republicans, like every other trade agreement. Nobody knew at that point—including the Republican leadership—because everyone in the Republican Party was a little bit in shell shock as Trump got the nomination and then did so well in the polls—what it meant for their own position on trade. That’s when it became a problem. At that point Paul Ryan and [Addison Mitchell] Mitch McConnell [III] were more than willing to take a chance with it, because they didn’t know if they had the votes.

Again, I point to USMCA in retrospect. All the timetables laid out in the legislation notwithstanding, if the leadership wants to get it done, it can get it done almost overnight. If the leadership doesn’t want to get it done, then with all the protections of TPA in the world, it’s not going to happen.

By the time of the conventions, Trump is obviously the nominee. Hillary’s the nominee, is ahead in the polls, and is against this. It doesn’t appear, even in the weeks leading up to the election, that Trump is going to win. Between the conventions and Election Day, what is your conventional wisdom? What is your thinking on how this is going to play out?

The thinking at that point was you have to wait for the election, and for Trump to lose, and then Republicans will feel like they can go back to their historic position of being pro-trade, and we’ll get it done in the time allotted. That was the hope.

I remember this call: after having sat on it for so many months, Orrin Hatch calls me right after the election and says, “Well, I guess you guys could—” He says, “If you want me to submit it, I’ll submit it. I just don’t think it’s going to work.” Of course, had he acted on TPA eight months before, we could have gotten this whole thing done before the first primary, but that wasn’t to be. That’s where we ended up. What happened is Trump’s nomination froze things, and then you had to see whether he won or lost.

There’s lots of continuing conversations, answering questions, things like that, but nobody really wanted to deal with it until after the election. Then, of course, it became a nonissue.

Tell us your reactions to Election Night. Where were you? Walk us through.

I spent part of the evening at Penny Pritzker’s house in Washington. We were all watching the election results, and around 8:30 or 9:00 we realized this just wasn’t looking like we thought it would look. The mood was decisively dour at that point. We left and came home and stayed up late to see what happened. But at that point I was shell-shocked—having little to do with trade, just more generally about what it meant for the country.

Had the President spoken to you individually at all during the campaign about Trump’s rise, or about him personally, or about the Birther movement?

Not so much about Trump, no. No. We talked about issues like the timing and keeping things warm until after the election and then seeing what’s possible in the lame duck, but we didn’t really discuss Trump, per se.

After the election, there’s that couple-day pause, and then Trump comes into the White House. There are moments of hope for some Democrats that he’ll end up being slightly less disruptive than he ends up being. Do you remember your own views after the election about where this might go?

Yes. I held the view that, one, he didn’t mean everything he said; two, even if he meant everything he said, life will look different when he’s President, and he’ll be more responsible as President; and three, congressional Republicans would have a positive influence on constraining him. All three of which proved to be wrong.

Tell us what you remember about the transition. Did you meet with incoming Trump people? Famously, the administration gets divided between the globalists and the America Firsters. What are you seeing during the transition in that regard, some of the people being named, some of the people coming on?

The transition team for USTR was supposed to be headed by Dan DiMicco, who’s CEO of a steel company, aided by a Washington trade lawyer named Bob Lighthizer. DiMicco gets sick or something. He never comes in. Bob comes in with one of his law firm lawyers. I think he came in twice during the transition to meet with USTR team. I met with them once and that was it. That was the only contact they had with USTR.

Now, Bob is very experienced. He had worked at USTR in the [Ronald] Reagan administration; he’d worked on the Hill for Bob Dole; he’d been a trade lawyer at Skadden [Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP and Affiliates] for 30 years, so he knows his stuff. He knows the institution. He knows Congress and the congressional dynamic around trade, so he was very well qualified for the job. He has, obviously, a particular perspective on trade, not one that I completely agree with, but it’s a well-thought-out, coherent perspective that he’s developed over decades of experience. I can’t remember when he ends up getting nominated, whether it’s during the transition or into the term, but it’s not a particular surprise.

Taking a step back now, you’ve been along on this ride with President Obama for eight years, more than that. Stepping back even further, going back to your term as a White House Fellow at the end of the first [George H. W.] Bush administration, through eight years of Clinton, eight years away. The Trump election is a pivotal moment and a strange bookend on that 24-year period. Did it feel that way? Did it feel like this was a seismic shift in American politics?

It did.

On the issues, particularly, that you’ve worked on?

It did. It did, and on the broader set of issues, although I don’t think I fully anticipated how broad the impact would be. But, yes, certainly on, not just trade, but the role of the United States in the world, the role in terms of leadership that we have traditionally played, the way that others would look to us for leadership. Our withdrawing from that, yes, felt like a very big, tectonic shift.

Over the course of Bush I and Bush II, there had been broad consensus, Democrat and Republican, about the role of the U.S. in the world. The differences were not all that great, which I guess is one of the points that Trump made. This was a discontinuity.

Does it affect what you think is President Obama’s legacy? In other words, the fact that Trump would get elected after eight years of Obama, is that itself part of the Obama legacy?

That’s a good question. I viewed Trump’s election as more than a rejection of Obama-ism. I viewed it really as a rejection of decades of U.S. policy, Republican and Democratic. Things had been bubbling up for a while. Whether it was the role of the China shock from 2000 to 2008, or the role of the financial crisis, 2008 to 2010, whether it was a reaction to the Clinton/DLC approach to international economics—there was a pretty broad-based sweep against all of that, not just against Obama.

After all, Obama was more progressive, in my view, in his disposition and inclination than Bill Clinton, in many respects. He understood the forces of populism and the concern about Wall Street, or the concern around international finance, more than a lot of previous Presidents, having lived through the crisis. It was more than just Obama.

Is there anything Hillary or her campaign could have done, given that we know it was only 70,000 to 80,000 popular votes among three states that could have shifted? As you look back, anything that could have been done differently that could have affected the outcome?

Oh, I’m sure REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT in retrospect there are lots of things that she wishes and her campaign wishes she had done differently. You just don’t know what little things would have made that difference.

Probably, on balance, coming out against TPP was necessary. There’s an argument that that flip-flop added to a sense that she didn’t stand for anything. As much as I’d like to believe that she would have done better had she defended her position on TPP, I’m not sure in good faith I can really say that. I’m not sure what else I would have suggested.

Her comments on coal and about coal miners—lots of things, I’m sure, in retrospect she wishes she had done differently, but whether any of them would have made a difference at the end of the day, who knows?

The one country that I want to get your thoughts on, particularly because there is a meeting in the fall of 2016, is India: not part of TPP, a democracy often talked about in the Asian—if not encircling of China, at least a rising concern—and yet, a populist, in some people’s minds, a Trump-like figure, that’s the newish Prime Minister there. Do you have any thoughts and reflections about that, particularly because of their role on trade and how it evolved over the years?

Yes. There are some natural things that draw us together, including the democratic heritage, the strategic interests in the Asian Pacific, and this notion of “the Quad” that has been developed about pulling them in with Australia, Japan, and ourselves as a reflection of that.

The fact is that whether it was under [Manmohan] Singh or under [Narendra] Modi, they’re a very difficult trading partner. There really is very little to be done constructively with them on trade. They view trade policy in very different ways than the rest of the world. They raise and lower tariffs like they’re setting prices in a state-run economy: “Oh, we need some more wheat this week; we’re going to lower tariffs. Our farmers are hurting; we’re going to raise tariffs.” It’s a very different approach.

They were largely responsible for the failure of Doha in June 2008 during the Bush administration. They ended up blocking it for their own reasons. It would be interesting to know whether the Bush administration would have finished it if India had not blocked it at that point.

We long had debated about whether to involve them in APEC [Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation], because even the APEC countries—when China and the ASEAN [Association of Southeast Asian Nations] countries were negotiating RCEP, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership—ended up kicking India out because India was too protectionist even for them, who were no great economic liberalizers, on the whole, let alone China. They were seen as dragging down the level of ambition for an agreement between China and ASEAN. That says something.

It’s been one of the challenges, because there are so many reasons to cooperate with them on military issues, security issues, political issues, regional issues—Afghanistan, Pakistan, as well as China, Indian Ocean issues. There are so many good reasons to cooperate with them, but trade is one of those areas where we just don’t see eye to eye, and there’s very little room for cooperation.

Is the reason to go through a bilateral meeting like that at that time simply to emphasize the importance of the broader relationship, as opposed to thinking you’re actually going to get anything done? Or do you go into that kind of conversation thinking maybe there’s one or two things we can get done that are meaningful?

It’s mostly about the broader relationship. To the degree there are things to get done, it doesn’t tend to be in the trade portfolio.

The broader one of the two questions I have is that if you had to teach a course on lessons learned about the American Presidency, from your perspective, what would be the top two or three?

My second question is much more specific and current. It’s about the pandemic, which we have mentioned. We are sitting in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is spiking because of the so-called Delta variant. One of the reasons you mentioned it was TPP and the pangolins and the wet markets. But broader than that, when you think about the impact this pandemic has had, is having, will have on supply chains, pharmaceuticals, the PPE [personal protective equipment] issues, developing countries, what are your thoughts about that now and going forward?

To start on that one, maybe I’d broaden it out a little bit further: I think maybe it’s COVID-19, but more broadly, the tension in the relationship with China is leading a lot of companies and countries to rethink their supply chain. There was that period of industrial philosophy that was all about real-time delivery of inputs and making the inputs wherever it was cheapest, wherever that was in the world.

Companies were already moving away from that, in part because the costs were rising in China at about a 20 percent pace per year, labor costs and other costs, so the cost advantage of doing things in China—And then you have the dependency, the length of the supply chain that is open to being interrupted by shipping problems, or a tsunami, or any number of other—We saw that with the Japanese tsunami and how suddenly supply chains were being interrupted. Then you add, on top of that, COVID, and a realization of our dependence on certain countries for either PPE or for the compounds that go into drugs and the like.

For all those reasons, companies are looking at revising, strengthening the resilience, creating more redundancy around their supply chains. I’m not sure how much that’s likely to lead to re-shoring onto the U.S., and how much it’s likely to lead to companies at the margins, putting the next incremental investment in Vietnam, Malaysia, Mexico, Central America, something a little closer to home, in the latter case; some redundancy, even in Asia; some resilience against political dynamics, which may lead to tariffs being put on China in retaliation for something.

For all those reasons, we’re likely to see some changes there. But these are big decisions, and costly decisions. You don’t simply create a factory out of nothing, in most sectors. There are some exceptions, like textiles and apparel, which is very fluid, but for most sectors it involves billions of dollars of investment, so people need to look not just at this term or this President but what’s the likely dynamic going to be for five, 10, 15 years in the future.

On your other question about a course, I hadn’t really thought about it. I feel very privileged to have been in the White House for those years, and to have been able to see the President up close in summits and a number of other experiences. The personal element of the Presidency is really interesting, whether it’s how he or she manages their day, manages their stress, keeps sane.

That goes to the issue we talked about before, about playing golf with Members of Congress or not. The personal element of engaging with foreign leaders and how important that is, in and out of crises, to getting things done, how those with whom they have chemistry create certain opportunities; those with whom they don’t have chemistry lead to other challenges. Same with Congress.

Then the notion of how a President personally manages: manages the Cabinet, manages the White House, manages issues. To what degree are they into the micro details? To what degree do they delegate responsibility, give autonomy, provide support, are there when needed, and how do they manage that across different issues?

Those are modules of a course I would give: President as manager; President as diplomat; President as legislator, so to speak, dealing with the legislature; and President in his or her personal capacity.

Drilling down on the President as legislator—and I should say I’m somewhat obsessed with this topic, particularly on the constitutional issues. I’m very drawn to your job, and the trade issues, and TPA, because it’s, in theory, streamlined in a way that a lot of other legislative things are not.

Congress is often criticized for the rise of a more imperial Presidency, because Congress has abdicated authority, mostly because of its arcane rules and its complex politics. I’m beginning by asking this question with some prejudice, because it feels to me that you’ve been in a domain that looks comparatively better than, say, war powers, or the budget process, or others. Maybe it just feels that way. Maybe the grass is always greener, and it just feels that way on the outside.

What is your take on this? You didn’t seem so enamored with TPA before, so I would love for you to reflect on the powers of the Presidency in this sphere that you’ve gotten to know quite well, and your take on how it’s structured and what works and what doesn’t work.

It’s a bit of a unique area because there’s a twofold foot in the Constitution on trade, right? There’s the right of Congress to regulate interstate commerce, and there’s the right of the President to manage international relations and treaties. By definition, it’s always been a partnership.

I don’t think there is an area, leaving aside TPA, where there’s more congressional interaction and input into an area that the executive is responsible for executing on, than trade. Obviously, the budget is largely Congress’s to legislate. They can ignore what the President sends up or they can work with it. Foreign policy, largely the President, but this is right in the middle, and by design in the middle.

It’s one reason why USTR was created. It was pulled out of the State Department precisely because there was a view that it shouldn’t just be the province of diplomats looking to improve relations with other countries; it had to be rooted in domestic politics and economics, and so important for Congress to have a voice in that.

On the whole, notwithstanding my experience with TPP, it works pretty well. You do a lot of consultation with Congress prior to negotiating, during the negotiations. Members of Congress and staff are invited to come along to the negotiating rounds. They may be in the next room, but they’re there to meet not just with the U.S. negotiators but with the negotiators from all the countries, which is amazing. No other country does that, sends their parliamentarians along to negotiations with the U.S. to meet with the U.S. negotiators.

There’s a really important role for them to play. And the deal—it’s embodied in TPA, but I don’t think it has to be—is that there’s some trade-off of them willing to give up some of their procedural protections in order to make it possible to promise a foreign country that when they sit down and agree to something, it’s not going to be renegotiated by 535 Members of the House and Senate. That trade-off is recognized as being an important one.

All the USTRs were up on the Hill far more than virtually any of their counterparts in the Cabinet. That’s expected of them—It’s a key part of the job—and Members of Congress expect to see them up there in their offices, even if they get sick of them after a while.

The trade-off is that at the end of the day, the USTR needs to be able to say to their counterpart from another country, “If you agree to this, I can submit it without amendment for approval,” and to help other countries deal with their politics so that they’re not agreeing to something and then have to reopen it every time a single Member of Congress has a desire to get something further.

Yet, you put together this incredibly complex, extraordinary agreement that people from both parties seemed to think was the right thing to do, and it didn’t pass. Do you think it’s flawed forever, flawed for the future? What do you see as the power in this domain moving forward?

I’d separate TPP from a broader observation about it. TPP itself has just got too much baggage to come back in exactly the same form that it is now. The substance of TPP can make its way into lots of other agreements, as it has. USMCA is about 85 percent, word for word, TPP, and it passed with broad bipartisan support.

In fact, the same provisions that some of my friends on the left opposed in TPP, they supported in USMCA. USMCA shows—I give great credit to Bob Lighthizer and his team—that you can maintain congressional bipartisan support for trade going forward, if you can line up the politics in the right way.

Trump fundamentally changed the politics around this. By threatening to pull out of NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement]—whether one believes that was a credible threat—it led people to be willing to accept and support an agreement that they would not have supported under a different President.

I would hope that future Presidents don’t have to play chicken with the international system the way Trump did in order for that to be the case going forward, but I’m optimistic that there can be bipartisan support for a progressive-looking trade agreement that builds on TPP, that includes some of the provisions of the USMCA, that can become the basis of agreement with the U.K.

If you have a Venn diagram between where TPP is and a bunch of other agreements that the U.S. is party to or could be party to, over time you could say, “Well, gee, 85 percent of these provisions are the same. Let’s dock these together somehow for the part we all agree on, and begin to create a broader set of high standards and rules for the trading system.”

I’m then torn: Is one legacy of Trump that you just have to talk tougher to get things passed domestically? Or does that perpetually spoil the water with other countries for us being seen as the leader of a rules-based global trading system, that we are not reliable anymore, or we’re only going to be able to pass things if it’s obviously in our interest?

I have two views on that. One thing Trump did was he questioned the conventional wisdom about what was possible, or what would happen if you did X. It turns out the sky doesn’t fall; other countries just adjust to it.

That’s opening up opportunities for future administrations, who may not need to be as disruptive to the international system as Trump, but who can say, You know what? We should not hold back from asserting our interests. By the way, we never thought we held back from asserting our interests in a particular way, because other countries will adjust. That’s one sentiment I have.

The other sentiment I have is I think global trust in the U.S. has been damaged, and that even though under Biden the pendulum has swung back a bit, and our engagement has been appreciated, and allies feel like we’re more of a partner, they look to us with a bit more of a jaded perspective, or a bit more of a critical perspective, knowing that while Trump may or may not ever be back in the White House, the forces that put him there are still very much alive in the country. And at least for the foreseeable future, that’s part of our American politics that we’re going to deal with, the 35 or 40 percent of the American public who really resonate to the Trump message, that he was really able to amplify. That will affect future administrations of both parties going forward.

That makes other countries a little bit wary of us, a little bit distrustful, more eager to hedge their bets. We see that a little bit in even how we deal with China: some of our allies, while they share our perspective vis-á-vis the challenges that China poses, don’t want to be pulled into a dispute between us because they’re not sure where we will ultimately end up on these issues.

I’m keen to hear from your perspective anything else that jumps back after this turn in government about President Obama. First of all, did you get to go to the Bruce Springsteen concert at the White House in the last two weeks that became the basis of the play on Broadway?

I did. I have to say, the Obamas were terrific hosts. We had great concerts, great birthday parties. They were great across the board, and very down to earth. They’d be out there dancing. It was great. I don’t know what it was like during the Trump administration, but I can say: the Obama administration was a fun place to work. It was a very fun and supportive atmosphere. I was at the Springsteen concert. I haven’t seen the show on Broadway. I’m going to have to go up and have a look. It was terrific.

Broader reflections now. We’ve dragged you through your eight years. You’ve given us terrific insights on things large and small. What is still out there? What do you think will be the Obama legacy on your set of issues?

The Obama legacy will be one of progressive pragmatism. Maybe that’s a contradiction in terms, but whether it was recognizing and driving consensus around the view that the Doha Round wasn’t going to succeed, and that the WTO needed to become a much more pragmatic institution, not based on the ideology of multilateralism, but on getting done what could get done among coalitions of the ambitious.

Maybe we were a little bit ahead of our time with TPP vis-á-vis China. Maybe the politics would have been different if it was a few years later, and we would have had a bit more leeway to exercise, as people understood the critical nature of this, in our relationship. I’ve said this repeatedly, publicly—pulling out of TPP will be viewed, historically, as one of our most significant strategic blunders as a country. That will be a bit of a legacy of his, which is that he was doing the right thing, either prematurely, or we had let the politics get out of our control on it and didn’t manage it sufficiently well to be able to deliver it at the end of the day. That’s where I think that would be.

Thirdly, really developing the idea of using trade to further other objectives—environmental, labor—that didn’t get started with Obama; that happened before Obama—but in a meaningful way, taking these multilateral environmental agreements, really focusing on labor reforms in places like Mexico and Vietnam. Really figuring out how to use the leverage of trade to address these other important social priorities, could potentially be a legacy of his, as well. Even at the end that not all of it was implemented, the fact that we were able to negotiate these things and show the linkage between them led to USMCA, that will be a key part of trade agreements going forward.

I think we have covered the landscape in detail, and Mike has been so patient with us in answering all of these questions. Unless you have anything else to add, we want to thank you, first of all, for your public service, and for your participation in this project, and giving us two days of your time.

My pleasure. It’s been fun going down memory lane with you, and I appreciate all the work that went into preparing the research and the questions and the like. I look forward to reading the transcript and finalizing it.

[END OF TRANSCRIPT]