Ryan Small

16 December 2022

On a brisk November morning in 1999, the tranquil, near-empty streets of Seattle were suddenly plunged into war. With little warning, a tsunami of almost 50,000 protesters flooded city block after city block. Caught in the center of this vortex was the Washington State Convention and Trade Center, the venue for an ongoing World Trade Organization conference.¹ Law enforcement, overwhelmed and ill-equipped to deal with the sheer size of the mob, desperately sought to restore order and contain the demonstrators. Bricks, rubber bullets, and tear gas were soon flying through the air. When all was said and done, the city lost $20 million in lost sales and property damage.²

The ugly outcome of the 1999 WTO protest, deemed the “Battle of Seattle,” has left little room to discuss why so many protesters had swarmed the World Trade Organization in the first place.On its face, the answer is not obvious. Environmentalists, conservatives, libertarians, and unionists could all be seen outside the Trade Center’s walls,¹ and the demonstrations received the endorsement of both far-left “black blocs” and ultraconservatives such as Pat Buchanan.³ The reasons for the WTO protest were almost as varied as the demonstrators themselves: human rights failures, environmental neglect, and, most notably, the perceived disaster that was free trade.Ultimately, what tied this motley crew together was a hostility towards the effects of economic globalization, embodied by the WTO. Founded just four years prior for the purpose of promoting (and enforcing) global free trade, the organization incensed antiglobalists of every stripe.⁴

The demonstrators saw Washington leading the nation down the primrose path of free trade but were ultimately powerless to stop it. As journalist Alexander Cockburn noted, the Battle of Seattle was “more epilogue than overture.”⁵ After reaching a zenith in the 1990s and early 2000s, American skepticism, let alone hostility, towards globalization gradually faded into obscurity. Voices who railed against the “Washington consensus” were eventually forgotten, as Ross Perot’s warnings of a “giant sucking sound” vacuuming out American jobs went roundly ignored.⁶ Free global trade marched on unimpeded. Following WTO logic, the United States continued to shed jobs and capital, opting to import our goods from countries who could produce them more efficiently.

Two decades after the acme of the anti-globalization movement, it appears that Washington has learned that unrestricted international trade comes with a cost. Under the free trade regime of the past half-century, a sizable chunk of our own manufacturing has since been shipped overseas, particularly to China and Latin America. An estimated 90,000 factories, as well as nearly five million jobs, have left the United States after our embrace of globalization.⁷ It is true that low production costs in foreign countries translate to lower prices for American consumers, but by forfeiting our native industries, America’s commitment to free trade jeopardizes our sovereignty. Now, the United States is “unable to put a single military aircraft into the sky without using components made by potential adversaries.”⁸ The COVID-19 pandemic and its surrounding crises have further highlighted the instability of our free-trade commitment. In February 2020, the World Health Organization warned the United States about a possible shortage of medical devices: there was a significant chance that China, the nation we most rely on for such equipment, would stockpile them for domestic use.⁹ Just one month later, the Chinese government toyed with the idea of imposing export controls on pharmaceuticals, which would have stopped the flow of life-saving drugs to the United States and left us defenseless against the virus.¹⁰ Such a lopsided US-China dynamic, although perfectly in accordance with WTO-sponsored globalization, began to raise alarm bells in Washington.⁹

Only now, twenty years after the Battle of Seattle, has the federal government changed its tune. In an aggressive play that flew in the face of free-trade principles, the Biden administration in October 2022 levied crippling sanctions on the Chinese semiconductor industry: China was prohibited from purchasing the best American chips, and American citizens were forced to resign from Chinese technology companies.¹¹ This “Great Tech Decoupling” was the capstone of the administration’s consistent push to disentangle the American economy from that of China, marking the United States’ largest departure from the free-trade consensus since the inception of the WTO.¹¹ Through these recent actions, the regime of globalization that the Seattle protesters decried is now being partially dismantled by Washington, as Biden tries to put the free-trade genie back in the bottle. But as the adversaries who inherited our economic muscle are playing for keeps, this mad dash to undo globalization’s excess is likely too little, too late.

Bibliography

1. “World Trade Organization Protests in Seattle.” World Trade Organization Protests in Seattle, https://www.seattle.gov/cityarchives/exhibits-and-education/digital-document-libraries/world-trade-organization-protests-in-seattle.
2. “WTO Protests Hit Seattle in the Pocketbook.” CBCnews, CBC/Radio Canada, 6 Jan. 2000, https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/wto-protests-hit-seattle-in-the-pocketbook-1.245428.
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9. Karlin-Smith, Sarah. “FDA: No Drug Shortages Reported Because of Coronavirus but Situation ‘Fluid’.” POLITICO, 7 Feb. 2020, https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/07/chinese-drugs-shortage-coronavirus-112049.
10. Chakraborty, Barnini. “China Hints at Denying Americans Life-Saving Coronavirus Drugs.” Fox News, FOX News Network, 13 Mar. 2020, https://www.foxnews.com/world/chinese-deny-americans-coronavirus-drugs.
11. Swanson, Ana, and Edward Wong. “With New Crackdown, Biden Wages Global Campaign on Chinese Technology.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 13 Oct. 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/13/us/politics/biden-china-technology-semiconductors.html.

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