Secretary of State John Kerry warned against the wave of nationalism that Donald Trump rode into the White House. | AP Photo Kerry: Trade deal opponents are acting ‘knee-jerkingly’

Secretary of State John Kerry stood up for the likely-doomed Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal he helped negotiate, defending free trade in a speech Tuesday even as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to reverse U.S. policy on the issue.

Trump made opposing the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership and renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement key pillars of his presidential platform, which included a plan to impose tariffs on imports from companies that move jobs out of the United States. With the Manhattan billionaire set to transition into the presidency in January and little enthusiasm in the lame-duck Congress to pass TPP, White House press secretary Josh Earnest admitted Tuesday that “prospects are not good” for the agreement.


Kerry nonetheless derided opponents of trade, a group that to varying degrees also included Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), saying they miss the larger point of the modern international economy.

“I just saw earlier today a statistic that 85 percent of job loss in the United States is due to technology, not trade,” Kerry said in his remarks Tuesday afternoon to the Women’s Foreign Policy Group in Washington, D.C. “So we’re running around hearing people battle a dragon called trade when in fact, it’s not the fundamental problem. It’s the structure that we have underneath the trade that doesn’t provide the social safety network.”

Instead, Kerry said encouraging ongoing education, job training and higher wages as well as addressing income inequity should be the real concerns for those worried about trade. To focus so narrowly on trade deals, he said, will ultimately do a disservice to the American people.

“You tell me how the economy of the United States is going to grow if 95 percent of the world’s customers live in another country,” he said. “But we’re going to start knee-jerkingly just closing off some of that because we’re blaming other people?”

More broadly, Kerry warned against the wave of nationalism that Trump rode into the White House. He said the instinct to turn away from the international community is understandable but that efforts to resist globalization are ultimately futile. The world, he said, is too interconnected for any one nation to withdraw.

“International challenges, my friends, have to be confronted with honesty, with determination and with confidence, not with slogans and little pithy tweets, or whatever, that pretend to somehow deal with the complexity of this age,” Kerry said. “And if we don’t do that, we will fail to be able to lead because we will not be taken seriously.”

