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has a quality of its own.” In World War II in particular, it was not just the brave soldiers, sailors, and pilots who beat the Nazis and Imperial Japan. It was America’s factories—its “arsenal of democracy”—that overwhelmed the Axis forces.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, almost certainly spawned in a CCP biological weapons lab in Wuhan, China,” global supply chains have been under significant pressures from lockdown policies, energy price shocks, and other disruptions, including labor market disruptions. At the height of the pandemic, the rising geopolitical risk associated with globalized supply chains was underscored when Communist China, which controls much of the world’s pharmaceutical production and supply chains, threatened to plunge America “into a mighty sea of coronavirus” through pharmaceutical export controls° if American politicians dared to investigate what happened at the Wuhan lab.

Add all this up, and America’s trade situation and massive trade imbalances pose not only asevere economic security threat, but also a national security threat. As President Donald Trump indicated in announcing his 2017 National Security Strategy, “economic security is national security.””

CHALLENGE #1: UNFAIR AND NONRECIPROCAL TRADE INSTITUTIONALIZED IN WTO RULES

Tonight, Iam also asking you to pass the United States Reciprocal Trade Act, so that if another country places an unfair tariff on an American product, we can charge them the exact same tariff on the exact same product that

they sell to us.

President Donald J. Trump, 2019 State of the Union Address®

The World Trade Organization, with its 164 members, governs international trade rules. Under its most favored nation (MFN) rule, each WTO member must apply the lowest tariffs it applies to the products of any one country to the products of every other WTO country. Importantly, nothing in the MFN rule requires a WTO member to provide equal—that is, reciprocal or mirror—tariff rates to its trading partners. Rather, under MFN, WTO members can charge systematically higher tariffs to other countries to the extent negotiated in their WTO tariff schedules so long as they apply those same higher tariffs to all countries.

As a poster child for the kind of nonreciprocal tariffs that American manufacturers often face, the MFN tariff for automobiles applied by the U.S. is only 2.5 percent. In contrast, the EU charges 10 percent, Communist China 15 percent, and Brazil 35 percent. Similarly, while the U.S. applies an MFN tariff rate of 6.2 percent on the rice it buys from Malaysia, Malaysia applies an ad-valorem equivalent tariff of 40 percent on rice from the U.S. Meanwhile, European milk producers are shielded