U.S. News and World Report has an interesting interview with U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab regarding the pending U.S. - Colombia Free Trade Agreement. Whether you are for it or against, it’s worth a read to get her take on the big picture.

Why is the Colombian agreement such a big deal for the White House? If Colombia were a state, given the size of its economy, it would just be Iowa.
Take a look at Caterpillar. If you talk to Jim Owens, the CEO of Caterpillar, he will tell you that the Peru and Colombia markets combined are bigger for Caterpillar than either the Japanese market or the German market or the U.K. market. And why is that? You’ve got a lot of extractive industries in that region. But that’s real money, and that’s U.S. jobs.

And her thoughts on what might happen if the trade agreement doesn’t pass:

Leaders in the hemisphere and Latin America have said that the single most destabilizing factor in Latin America today may be the U.S. Congress’s failure to ratify the Colombia Free Trade Agreement. That is more destabilizing today than anything that Colombia’s neighbor Venezuela is doing or threatening to do— and that is saying a lot.

And beyond Latin America?
Then you have the whole issue of U.S. global leadership and the exercise of “soft power.” One of the principal instruments of soft power that any president has is our trade and commercial relationships, and if you reject the use of trade in that context, you are giving up a tremendously valuable instrument that also has major economic and commercial benefits for us. If the Congress is not capable of ratifying a trade agreement that is so clearly in our interest, it raises real questions about our global economic leadership going forward.

Read the whole thing. Big hat tip to ShopFloor.org.

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