The Trump-Netanyahu Meeting

Prime Minister Netanyahu is due to meet with President Trump Monday to talk, in part, about tariffs. It wouldn’t surprise us if the Israel leader were to try to talk with Mr. Trump about President Reagan. Mr. Netanyahu, after all, was emerging as a rising figure during the years when Reagan was reaching America’s trade agreement with the Jewish state. Tread carefully, we’d suggest. Mr. Trump thinks he has a far better understanding of the trade issue. The president marked this point just the other week. “Look, I’m a huge fan of Ronald Reagan,” he said at a press scrum, “but he was bad on trade.” In 1985 President Reagan launched a pilot program, signing a free trade agreement with Israel. It would, Reagan told Congress, “provide duty free access to an $8 billion market in which we currently face relatively high duties and certain non-tariff barriers.” He called the agreement with Israel the “first of its kind.”Mr. Netanyahu was then Israel’s envoy at the UN and finding his voice as an advocate of free market economic ideas. Later, as finance minister and premier, Mr. Netanyahu deregulated, privatized, and opened highly-protected Israeli markets. He purged the Jewish state of its socialism and “bet his political legacy on the idea that Israel could be a ‘Start-Up Nation’ by anchoring itself in global markets,” Raoul Wootliff writes. America was his favorite market. That bet paid off. Largely because of Bibinomics, once-socialist Israel is now an economic giant. Last month’s $32 billion purchase by Google of the cloud security firm Wiz shows America benefits, too. Yet unlike Reagan, Mr. Trump is skeptical of rewarding allies with favored trade to advance America’s geostrategic goals. In his first term, the president exited the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which could have favored allied economies over Communist China.Several of Mr. Trump’s predecessors have advocated favored trade policies with the world’s democracies, a concept in which Mr. Trump seems uninterested. Yet, like-minded leaders — Viktor Orban, Narendra Modi, Giorgia Meloni et al come to mind — could be well-positioned to negotiate their way out of trade Siberia. As our Benny Avni reports, President Milei of Argentina is already working on a “zero tariff” pact with Mr. Trump. That approach to tariff negotiations is endorsed in a Wall Street Journal editorial this evening. That is, to respond to Mr. Trump by offering to drop tariffs on American imports to zero. That demarche has apparently already been mooted by the noble comrades at Hanoi — and Mr. Trump is hailing it as a breakthrough. One could have imagined a similar gesture by a staunch ally like Israel would not be inapt.On the eve of “liberation day,” Mr. Netanayahu announced that Israel would remove small trade barriers on U.S. goods, which persisted after Reagan’s trade pact. Yet Mr. Trump announced a 17 percent tariff on Israel. Will Mr. Netanyahu convince him that Israel can show the benefits of reciprocal removal of trade barriers? Maybe, but remember that Mr. Trump doesn’t see America as the winner in the pact Reagan struck with the Jewish state.

The Trump-Netanyahu Meeting

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