Beginning of the end of America's empire

Peter Navarro is the senior advisor for trade in the Trump administration.

- SUNIL SHARAN

Peter Navarro is the senior advisor for trade in the Trump administration. He is also a dedicated Trump loyalist, having gone to jail for three months during the Biden administration. He is one of only three high-ranking White House officials to have survived the entire first Trump administration.

Navarro is an accomplished writer and speaker. He hit the airwaves recently. Vietnam has proposed a zero-zero trade policy vis-à-vis the United States. But Navarro was not happy with that. He said that Vietnam should remove non-tariff trade barriers established against the United States such as cheap labor.

Navarro's aims dovetail those of Trump's. Both say that the United States has been deindustrialized and that manufacturing must come back to the U.S. They point to the hollowed-out Rust Belt, an entire swathe of Midwestern territory from where manufacturing has moved overseas.

But in economics, water finds its own level. Do Navarro and Trump really expect Vietnam to raise its labor costs? Inexpensive labor costs are the unique selling proposition for manufacturing. Because of cheap labor costs, China became the factory of the world. Now as labor costs are rising in China, manufacturing is moving to lower-cost countries like Vietnam and the Philippines, and to a small extent, to India.