George W. Bush has slapped tariffs on steel and textiles and increased US farm subsidies. John Kerry has vowed to scrutinise all US trade pacts within 120 days of taking office and to enforce them more vigorously.
No matter whether the Republican incumbent or his Democratic challenger wins Tuesday's presidential election, the rest of the world is resigned to four years of turbulence in trade policy - especially if the US trade gap widens further, destroying jobs.
"The macroeconomic picture looks pretty bad and is set to get worse, and that's bound to reverberate on trade. Neither Kerry nor Bush has come up with any feasible solutions on that front," said Razeen Sally, a trade expert at the London School of Economics.
Surging Chinese textile imports, a spat with Europe over aircraft subsidies and an exodus of white-collar jobs to India are among the issues that will pose an acid test of the two contenders' rhetorical commitment to free trade.
Critics say Bush has partly failed that test during his first term by bowing to political demands to protect key industries.
But Sally said big Asian powers, particularly China and India, were privately hoping Bush would be re-elected because they worry Kerry would take an even harder line.
"What they fear is that a Kerry administration, at least in the first six months to a year, will have to pander to the more extreme forces in the Democrat tent," Sally said.
Alan Oxley, a former Australian ambassador to GATT, the forerunner of the World Trade Organisation, noted that the Bush administration ultimately insisted on exempting sugar from the US-Australia free trade deal due to take effect on January 1.
But he said there was at least an argument within the administration about the wisdom of protecting US sugar growers.
"You wouldn't expect those same sort of pressures to occur on the Democrat side," Oxley said.
The pressures on Kerry would be of a different nature: Oxley said the biggest difference is that Kerry would face fierce demands from his party to use trade policy for non-trade goals, notably by tying improved access to the US market to compliance with high environmental and labour standards.
Writing new labour and environmental rules under the umbrella of the 148-nation WTO is out of the question because of opposition from developing countries.
But Oxley said: "What's dangerous is that we could expect a Kerry administration to try to ramp up those elements in the bilateral trade agreements that the US negotiates."
Regardless of who wins, China for one knows it will face bigger hurdles to the US market and continued pressure to let its currency float higher to help narrow the US trade gap.
Bush's commerce secretary, Don Evans, told Reuters this week that Washington would not hesitate to put more curbs on imports of Chinese socks and other clothing if the case for doing so was compelling.
Bruce Rockowitz, managing director of Hong Kong-based Li and Fung Ltd, the largest buyer of Chinese-made garments for global retailers, is dismayed by such talk.
"There's such strong protectionism right now. I don't know how much worse it could get against China," Rockowitz said.
But Fan Gang, director of the National Economic Research Institute in Beijing, said he was struck by how little "China bashing" there had been during this election campaign.
The US and Chinese economies were now so intertwined that any protectionist pleas would ring hollow, especially as China's geopolitical importance to Washington had grown since the September 11 attacks, Fan wrote in a syndicated comment.
"The relative silence about China in the US these days may be due merely to the news dominance of the Iraq war. Yet it may also indicate that America's political elite is facing up to new realities and adjusting its view of China accordingly," he said.
India's information technology businesses are also quietly pleased that the US political backlash to their success in attracting large numbers of service jobs has not been fierce enough - at least yet - to slow the sector's phenomenal growth.
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Pascal Lamy, the European Union's outgoing trade commissioner, agreed with the conventional wisdom that Democrats are less keen than Republicans on opening markets.
If most of Europe was rooting for Kerry, it was not because of his stance on trade. But Lamy added a caveat. "On trade policy the key is Congress and not the president," he said.
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