I recently spoke at a conference in Washington hosted by the National Council of Textile Organizations. It was a bittersweet experience.
Sweet because during the darkest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when Americans desperately needed masks, gowns, and every other form of personal protective equipment to stay alive, I turned to NCTO in my White House role and asked it to help meet our suddenly massive PPE needs. And NCTO ran to the sound of the guns.
Across America, NCTO members ramped up production and stood up new factories in record time. I worked with the Departments of Health and Human Services and Defense to enforce “Buy American” rules and get contracts in place so we could move in Trump Time — as fast as possible without screwing it up.
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By the time President Donald Trump left office in 2021, we had rebuilt a domestic textile and PPE base not just as a source of jobs, but as an insurance policy against the next pandemic, the next supply-chain rupture, and the next geopolitical shock.
The bitter part came when NCTO members told me how the Biden administration had dismantled much of what we had built. No renewed contracts. Buy American waivers run rampant. The old, cheap-at-any-cost globalist mentality returned. Once again, our government depends far too heavily on foreign supply for products essential in a crisis.
This is just the latest chapter in a crisis that began more than 50 years ago, when textiles became one of the first great American industries broken by the false promises of globalism. If you want to understand what happened, start with Greensboro, North Carolina.
In 1973, the denim in virtually every pair of blue jeans, not just in America but around the world, was made in Greensboro. Then came the first trade shock: the Asian Tigers.
The emerging sweatshops of Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan made it much harder for American textile factories to compete. Nobody in politics gave a damn about the communities being hollowed out. The elites only cared that the goods were cheap. There was no strategic thought. No understanding that once you lose an industrial base, getting it back is much harder than throwing it away.
Shock two came in 1978 with Deng Xiaoping’s so-called reform and opening. Hong Kong, already a formidable manufacturing platform, rapidly expanded production into mainland China using even cheaper labor, larger scale, and the backing of a mercantilist state willing to subsidize and direct industry for strategic gain.
Then came the giant sucking sound of the North American Free Trade Agreement in the 1990s and, as textiles’ coup de grace, China’s obscene entry into the World Trade Organization in December 2001.
The damage from the WTO was greater than all three previous shocks combined. Under the WTO’s so-called Most Favored Nation rules, other countries can charge America substantially higher tariffs than we charge them.
Its dispute-resolution mechanism is also hopelessly broken. If another country cheats, we can file a complaint. Then maybe three or four years later — after we have already lost the factory, the jobs, the suppliers, and maybe the town — we might get a favorable ruling. But even then, the guilty party often does not comply.
The WTO is not a system designed to preserve America’s strategic industries. It is a system designed to rationalize their destruction.
When a pandemic from Wuhan hit in 2020, suddenly we were asking: Where are our masks? Our surgical gowns? The textile factories to protect our doctors, nurses, and citizens?
What we have always understood in the Trump administration, and what America’s great protectionist statesmen understood long before us — from Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay to Abraham Lincoln and William McKinley — is simple: if you do not have domestic production, you have neither economic sovereignty nor military sovereignty.
At the White House, I am redoubling my efforts to expand our Buy American rules significantly, dramatically reduce the waivers that penny-wise and national security-foolish bureaucrats love to hand out like candy, and use the full power of federal procurement to create the demand signals American manufacturers need to invest, hire, and expand.
Visiting with NCTO last week reminded me of all this. America’s textile manufacturers had our back when the pandemic hit and the country desperately needed what they make. Now America must have theirs — not as a favor to one industry, not as nostalgia, and not as some regional development program, but because when we help textiles, we help the country.
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And if we fail to learn that lesson from textiles, we will keep relearning it the hard way — in rare earths, in chips, in steel, in copper, and in every other strategic industry China targets next.
Economic security is national security. That is not a bumper sticker. It is a strategic organizing principle.
Peter Navarro is the White House senior counselor for trade and manufacturing.