WASHINGTON: The Trump administration through its aggressive trade policy is seeking to protect the US industry and have a balanced and fair trade with other nations, President Trump's senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner said on Monday.
Kushner said the President believed in bilateralism and not multilateralism.
President Trump has been for a long time very consistent on his ideology and believes trade deficits matter, Kushner said at a CNN event.
"If trade deficits don't matter then why is it that I have not met another country that wants to have one? People criticise a lot of things we're fighting for, saying that they're protectionist.
But if the things are so bad, then why are the other countries working so hard not to give them up?" he asked.
"A lot of what we're doing is working to protect American industry. So, what the economists will say is free trade is a great thing because it lowers the cost of goods.
And what I've come to observe, seeing all the different parts of our economy is that the benefits of free trade are much more distributed," he explained in response to a question.
Kushner said once there was a free trade agreement, everyone's cost of a t-shirt goes down by a dollar or whatever it is.
"But the costs of it are much more concentrated. So you'll have in a place like, Baltimore, a steel mill will go out of business," he noted.
As a result, people will have a hard time finding jobs late in their career, he added.
"We are doing a lot of things on worker retraining, but we haven't done that in the past. Some people on to commit crimes, some people get addicted to drugs: but that goes to the next generation.
So we have seen some areas that have just been decimated because of the trade, and I think that that cost is quite great," he said.
Kushner said Trump was trying to reverse the world order that emerged after World War II.
"I think that the world order that the president is really trying to reverse is that of the post Second World War, we basically were the richest nation on the planet and we said let's open our markets to everybody and let's come up with a way we can protect everybody to keep the peace because nobody wanted to go to war again," he said.
"What we should have done is, probably about 30 years later when people caught up is readjusted some of these deals that were intentionally one-sided at the time.
I think that now we're getting to a place where it's just not a sustainable situation to be paying for everyone's defence and then also giving everyone asymmetric access to the American market," Kushner said.
He said Trump was trying to rebalance these agreements so that Americans have a fair relationship with many countries they are trading with and making it fairer.
Responding to a question, Kushner said Trump wanted to conclude a trade agreement quicker rather than the usual route of three-four years.
"The thing about trade agreements is normally they take three to four years. And the president did not have three to four years' for this one. So, he really pushed us very aggressively to try to come to an outcome quickly," he said.
The new approach was adopted in conducting the new trade agreement with Mexico and Canada, which is now known as the US Mexico Canada Agreement (USMCA).
"The goal was really to come up with a win-win, how do we create something where we want to move a lot of jobs back to America, but we want to figure out how the other countries could do well from it as well," he said.
"We wanted to deal with a lot of issues in the modern economy, like IP and digital trade.
We also wanted to deal with the assault a lot of our markets are under from non-market economies that deal with currency manipulation, manipulation of state on enterprises, and a lot of other issues," Kushner noted.