Addressing U.S.-Japan Trade Deficits
Floor Speech
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Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, considering the visit this week from His Excellency Kishida Fumio, Prime Minister of Japan, I rise to thank both him and his country's commitment to our deepening alliance of liberty.
I also rise to discuss where I believe there is room for improvement and greater parity in the trade relationship between our United States of America and Japan, our essential ally in the Pacific.
Japan is a key ally to our Nation, but there have been concerning developments within our trade and economic relationship that deserve attention. In particular, the U.S. and Japan's lingering and huge trade deficit is of great importance, certainly in my manufacturing region of America, our steelworkers, autoworkers, and manufacturers across our region, and the entire industrial Midwest.
Due to the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, passage over 40 years ago with additional export caps and a slew of other flawed trade policies, the industrial heartland of our country has been left behind again and again. As jobs were outsourced and markets were left closed, it was hard for us to get our exports into Japan.
As we embark on this next phase of our relationship with Japan, of the utmost importance to our country and global security, I would urge President Biden, lawmakers, agencies, the military, and even Japan itself not to again leave behind the manufacturing heartland and the people of our country whom I am in this very room to represent.
It is all too easy to get caught up in achieving our shared economic and security goals and to forget those right here at home.
Specifically, my constituents have been cut out of trade deals over and over. Our manufacturers find it extremely difficult to get items into Japan, and we have our markets open. We have markets open for investment by Japan in this country. Try to afford to invest in Japan by a major U.S. company.
The Japanese are smart traders, and they are able, and they are paying attention to the world, but so are my constituents. Also, make no mistake. If you leave people behind here at home, they can leave you behind, too.
In fact, we have lived the results of past unfair trade deals every day, and that has thrown skepticism on international partnerships that have not been fair, and isolationist tendencies have developed among some Americans who harbor these tendencies. However, these nagging trade deficits are one reason, and they currently impede our ability to uphold our commitment to such important alliances.
Therefore, why not embrace this moment? Let's embrace it to move closer to a new era for the industrial Midwest rather than repeat the mistakes of the past.
In 2022, the U.S. trade deficit with Japan was over $70 billion, but that was not an isolated year. Going back 40 years, the amount of that deficit is in the trillions.
Why does this statistic look like this, and how does it look to the people of Ohio and the workers and companies of Ohio?
Let's use the auto industry as an example. In 2021, the U.S. imported 1,400,000 vehicles from Japan, but Japan only took 20,000 of our vehicles; to be exact, 20,233. So that is 1.4 million for them-- 1,400,000--and for us, 20,233. That is a 70-1 import-to-export ratio in automobiles. When you count parts and you count steel and so many other components that Japan keeps out, the number is even bigger.
It is terribly difficult for American automakers and auto parts suppliers to break into and stay in the Japanese market. There are many, many impediments. Additionally, in December of 2023, Nippon Steel, a Japanese firm, announced its intention to buy the iconic U.S. Steel Company.
U.S. Steel has long provided tens of thousands of Americans with dignified, living-wage jobs which have provided our Nation with the materials to build American vehicles on American soil. What America makes and builds, makes and builds America.
Formed in 1901 and still based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, it was once the largest steel producer in the world. It remains to this day one of the largest American steel producers, but I am concerned that, if the sale goes through, Nippon Steel will not be obligated to honor labor contracts, and American jobs will be lost again, meaning Midwest industrial America will be left behind again.
If we are to have free trade, we must also have fair trade, and we must, at a minimum, play by the same rules. Our partnership must yield a win-win for both our national security and Japan's, and our economic security and Japan's economic security. However, the ledger books don't get us there today. We have more work to do. Additionally, I asked the Prime Minister if he couldn't send a delegation to work on these exact issues.
In delivering this essential economic message, I again thank the Japanese Prime Minister Kishida for traveling so far to visit our Nation this week and for his kind words recognizing our many shared values; his fondness for his childhood, some of that time spent in America; and his appreciation for the importance of the U.S.-Japan alliance on the trade front. However, our two nations have much work to repair and much work to do. Republicans Parroting Putin for SOH
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Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, I now turn to another very essential topic and I mention that the majority party, the Republican Party, is long overdue in bringing to this floor the national security supplemental bill that includes support for Ukraine.
Let me be clear. Ukraine is fighting for its liberty. It can be felt and tasted. However, Ukraine is not asking the American people to die for her, but she is only asking for some help from us to buy the ammunition to win, to win their own liberty.
How could any American turn their back on this plea?
We are the leader of the free world. We like to say that. Are we really the leader of the free world? We cannot let Ukraine fail.
How can this Congress dither as lives are lost because of lack of ammunition, as liberty hangs in the balance on the eastern edge of Europe, our closest allies?
Ukraine has become the scrimmage line for liberty on the Continent of Europe today. Russia, without provocation, invaded the sovereign territory of Ukraine, first in 2014, and then expanded its zone of terror to take as much of Ukraine as the free world allows.
Think about that. Russia's dictatorship historically has a very sinister habit of gulping up territory that does not belong to it.
History instructs us that peace is possible when Russia is pushed back into her own boundaries. Just in the last century, Russia killed more innocent people than even Nazi Germany. Russia forcibly starved and murdered over 12 million people. Humankind doesn't even know how many because it was such an annihilation. Only God truly knows how many.
Then, Russia occupied territory in Europe for over 40 years, as far west as Berlin, Germany, and as far south as Turkiye.
Most recently, Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia in 2008, Crimea and Ukraine in 2014, and then a full-scale, illegal invasion in Ukraine in 2022, which remains a hot war and ongoing as we are here today.
Russia's greedy dictators, from Stalin to Putin, chomp off territory that is not theirs to take. Borders of nations must be sovereign.
The history of Europe is also clear. Russia is an expansionist tyranny. Sadly, but true, it always has been. Vladimir Putin intends to keep it that way. If the free world does not stand up to Russia now, it will continue to plunder adjoining nations, most of which are members of NATO. That broadened conflict will mean a much enlarged conflagration that will engage NATO militarily, and that includes the United States of America.
For some very misguided Members of the U.S. Congress, to let liberty twist and twist in the wind in Ukraine deeply harms the freedom- seeking, courageous people and soldiers of Ukraine. I find it mind- numbing to guess why some Members of this House choose to turn away from liberty at a moment of greatest challenge on a continent where over 500,000 Americans died for our liberty and their liberty.
Do our colleagues not grasp that their political antics aid and abet a real, proven enemy of liberty? Their foolery greatly endangers the people of our Nation going forward as my colleagues allow the death of Ukraine soldiers.
When Republicans acquiesce, acquiesce to Vladimir Putin, the acquiescent wing of the Republican Party damages the standing of the United States of America globally. Could we be observing modern-day quislings, people who acquiesce to tyrants and throw daggers right at liberty's heart? Can some of our colleagues actually believe they exist alone on this globe? Do my colleagues on the other side of the aisle know no history?
Let me assure my colleagues that they cannot retreat to sheltered little corners where they will remain safe. When the field to tyranny is ceded, when my colleagues whet its appetite, it will find them.
Could some of these Members among us hold their fanciful ideas because their families have been protected from the raw edge of tyranny? Could my colleagues not know the terrorist face of forced subjugation. Our family knows the face of Russian terror. Believe me, no person should ever have to endure its cruel, murderous, soulless apparatchiks.
Perhaps the lack of mandatory conscription in our Nation's military for a generation means that we as a country are yielding very naive candidates for Congress and even for the Presidency of our country, with some having no veterans in their own families.
Do Members of Congress genuflecting before Vladimir Putin actually not know that my colleagues are making our world a much more dangerous place in which to live? Are Members absent any veterans in their families who fought on the Continent of Europe in the last century and know the stakes?
For the first time in recorded history, the structure of a free world and the means to defend it hangs in the balance. In Europe, well over half a million lives were sacrificed to the vision of what we now call the free world. When our soldiers fought, the shield of liberty they bequeathed to each and every one of us and Members of this body that have royally blessed us, as they fought, they didn't have a name for the free world. There was no NATO. However, they understood when they met an enemy to liberty, and they fought against it with everything they had.
Anyone in this room, anyone listening, we have been blessed, living during the longest period of peacetime history among great powers that the world has ever known. We are blessed, not for anything we did ourselves, but for what those who came before us did for us. We can't squander that legacy.
Liberty's shield was created out of the profound sacrifices of our citizens, enabling all of us to live more comfortable lives, maybe too comfortable, about which the people of Ukraine can only now dream and fight.
I will ask my colleagues who oppose assistance to Ukraine: Have their lives perhaps been too comfortable? Do they know nothing of what our forebears sacrificed and fought for? Do they not know the face of tyranny?
Could Members of Congress be so vapid and unaware of America's critical role in the history of liberty? Do they not understand their dithering threatens liberty? Do they not understand, if one naively retreats into their comfortable corner of the world for safety, there will come a day when the mean forces of evil will find them and us?
Read about Stalin's Black Raven squads to understand who is empowered through ignorance. There is no safety in retreat. Our colleagues appease but do not understand what it takes to maintain a free world.
What a sacrilege to reward murderous dictators like Vladimir Putin. He operates in the style of his idol, Joseph Stalin, the most vile, crazed, savage Russian dictator. Stalin butchered millions upon millions of innocent human beings as their blood soaked and sanctified the holy land of Ukraine, as its Black Raven squads sought out any person who got in the way. They were starved by Russia, shot in the back of the head by Russia, smothered to death in church basements, buried in nameless mass graves, in forests, frozen and starved by the millions.
Did my colleagues not observe the recent torturous death of Russian freedom fighter Alexei Navalny? That is Putin's way of operating, modus operandi, kill the opposition.
By acquiescing to Russia, you reward murderers, despots, and tyrants. Parroting the talking points of Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin isn't just a sign of our colleagues' lack of knowledge on the subject. It is simply un-American.
Are my colleagues too blinded by full bellies, media distractions, and their own self-satisfaction and attention to miss the predator on the march?
Are my colleagues too consumed with the attention they draw by playing with the Devil that they foolishly hasten the day when the winds of oppression burn them and us?
Only time will tell, but as the hours, days, and weeks tick by, Ukrainian lives hang in the balance. Ukrainian soldiers valiantly resist the third largest military in the world.
I urge my colleagues to support funding for ammunition and weapons for Ukraine. I call upon the majority to bring the legislation to the floor immediately. Time is of the essence. The winter months over 2 years have been so, so difficult for the people of Ukraine and her soldiers.
Liberty hangs in the balance on our watch. Give us a chance to vote for liberty. Don't hold back the legislation another month and then another month and then another month. Meet the moment. Protect the national security of the United States and of Europe. Meet our obligations. Let's vote for support of Ukraine. I pray we can do that next week.
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