A corresponding battery of issues faces American policy-makers. Europeans might devote more high-level effort to a transatlantic initiative if they perceived that Americans were seriously committed to global engagement. But what they see is discouraging. Fast track is still in limbo, which inevitably undermines our credibility in the context of APEC, the Free Trade Area of the Americas, and the World Trade Organization. That brings me to my final point.
Trade is a divisive domestic issue in part because it leaves some people behind.
It follows that building support for trade calls for more effective efforts to help those people adjust to global competition. Several months ago the Institute for International Economics held a conference on re-starting fast track. Several leading Congressional opponents of fast track made it clear that they fully understand the benefits of trade to the American economy as a whole. But they are holding fast track hostage, they said, in order to draw attention to those who lack the skills and resources to compete. I am no expert in this area, but I imagine that Congress and the Administration should be talking about a package that includes the portability of pensions and health care, local private-public partnerships centered on community colleges, consolidated and flexible adjustment assistance designed to achieve a better match between training and jobs, and a range of other measures that take advantage of the flexibility and creativity of our economic system.