I believe in open trade.

I think the record is that we do better if we keep our borders open and we have reciprocal trade agreements.

But I emphasize reciprocal.

If we're going to open our markets to them, they've got to open their markets to us. And we want to make sure that they're not practicing anti-competitive practices, like dumping. And as president, I'd have no hesitancy in enforcing trade agreements. I'd like to see them have better labor standards, better environmental standards abroad. Those need to be put into the agreements, they need to be enforced. We're not going to bring those countries up to our standards; that's impossible.

But we can help.

We can help move this whole mankind forward, and that's what I believe in.

Excerpt from BusinessWeek
Howard Gleckman & Paul Magnusson, Wesley Clark: Marching Down the Middle,
October 13, 2003.

Clark is a Clintonesque free-trader who backs existing accords such as NAFTA and the World Trade Organization. But he would insist that new agreements satisfy international environmental and labor standards, and he opposes fixed exchange rates in countries such as China -- a policy that would boost U.S. exporters.

As we work on education, health care, and retirement security we must also improve the business climate in the United States.

This is not simply a matter of reducing interest rates and stimulating demand. Every year, this economy must create more than a million new jobs, just to maintain the same levels of employment, and to reduce unemployment to the levels achieved in the Clinton Administration, we must do much more immediately.

This is in part a matter of smoothing the business cycle, with traditional monetary and fiscal tools, but as we improve communications and empower more international trade and finance, firms will naturally shift production and services to areas where the costs are lower.

In the near term we should aim to create in America the best business environment in the world - using a variety of positive incentives to keep American jobs and businesses here, attract business from abroad, and to encourage the creation of new jobs, principally through the efforts of small business. These are not new concerns, but they must be addressed and resourced with a new urgency in facing the increasing challenges of technology and free trade. And labor must assist, promoting the attitudes, skills, education and labor mobility to enable long overdue hikes in the minimum wage in this country.

I’m going to give it to you straight. There’s not going to be any more trade agreements when I’m president that don’t have something on labor and environmental standards. They may not be OUR standards, but they’ll be in there…. And I will enforce those agreements. And I will make sure that countries can’t artificially peg their currency at a low level to take advantage of trade agreements that are existing, as China is doing today to the United States.

That having been said , NAFTA is in place. What we need to do is improve NAFTA. We need to make sure that the Trade Adjustment Act procedures are in place. We need to be slowing the pace of trade agreements so we do OUR job as the federal government and state government to anticipate dislocations that may occur.

We need to insist that trade agreements are reciprocal. If we’re opening our markets, we want them to open their markets. And we need to be sure that when we can anticipate the agreements and the dislocation, we’ve got resources available so that the people who might be displaced are already identified, we know who they are, we know what kind of jobs they can go to, we need work actively at job creation.

On balance, in the long term, we’ve always found in America, we’re better by engaging in trade than by shutting down trade. But we have to do it the smart way in this society. And there is a smart way and better way to do it than what emerged in the 1990’s and early 2000’s with NAFTA. So we’re just going to have to focus on specific areas—extension of the R&D tax credit, for example. We need to be investing on energy independence in this country, we need to be looking at environmental quality in this country and investing in it. We can be world leaders in technology for energy independence and the environment. Those industries will create manufacturing jobs.

The fundamental answer is that we need to pace our opening of markets to be able to handle the inevitable changes in the labor market that occur. We can’t just open markets willy nilly, then let tens of thousands of people suffer unemployment as a consequence without any remediation.