Does U.S. trade policy encourage Islamic terrorism? Edward Gresser, Director of the Progressive Policy Institute, suggests so. Muslim countries are left out of globalization's reach, Gresser maintains. U.S. trade policy should be used to bring these marginalized countries into the global family so as to more aggressively stamp out Islamic terrorism:Our tariff regime puts many nations in the Middle East, whose young people are susceptible to the sirens of Islamic fundamentalism, at an unintended disadvantage. This works against our efforts to stamp out jihadism.
Grasser points out that most of the 57 Muslim countries participating in the world economy are experiencing something of a "de-globalization": Since 1980, the population of the Middle East has jumped from 175 million to 300 million, while that of Muslim south and central Asia has gone from 225 million to 360 million. But the Muslim world's share of global trade has contracted by 75% in a generation. The result? "A quarter of a billion young people are fighting for opportunities no more extensive than those their parents had in the 1970s."
Grasser's figures are stark and depressing, but he maintains the problem is easily fixed. All we need to do is create more preference programs for the Middle East--programs along the lines of the African Growth and Opportunity Act, or the myriad free trade arrangements with Latin America and the Caribbean.
While I am an optimist about the pacification role free trade can play, I am not sure opening up the world market to more Pakistani bedsheets and sweaters is the answer to the terrorism problem. As many others have noted, poverty alone does not begin to explain terrorism. If it did, we would have far more terrorists than we do now considering the state of many African, Caribbean, Latin American and Asian economies. History has shown us countries left out of the globalization revolution tend to become islands of poverty, isolation and despotic rule . . but not necessarily exporters of global terror (consider North Korea or Myanmar, for example).
Poor Middle Eastern countries experience the same trade challenges faced by poor countries the world over: lack of foreign investment that would allow them to grow export markets, greater tariff barriers in products like textiles and footwear, and difficulties meeting quality standards imposed by American and European regulations. These challenges must be confronted (and I would suggest from a global rather than regional approach), but would that necessarily lead to a reduction in terrorism? It seems unlikely. (photo credit)
