U.S. Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) has called for the United States to economically decouple from China, stating that China has "waged economic war on our workers." Cotton made this statement in a December 10 post on X.
"China has destroyed millions of American jobs and waged economic war on our workers and businesses," said U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, U.S. Senator from Arkansas. "It's time to declare America's economic independence from China and end Beijing's most favored nation trade status."
According to Cotton, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has "destroyed millions of American jobs and stolen trillions of dollars in American intellectual property." He added that there is "nothing normal" about the current bilateral trade relationship with China and emphasized that the U.S. "cannot afford for it to be permanent."
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Chairman John Moolenaar (R-MI) of the House Select Committee on the CCP, along with Cotton, said in an op-ed for Fox News that "China abused its U.S. trade relationship." Moolenaar and Cotton have authored a comprehensive repeal of China's Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) to "strategically decouple the U.S. and Chinese companies" and to "end China’s economic war on American workers and businesses."
The U.S. granted PNTR status to China in 2000, leading to a significant expansion of bilateral trade between the two nations, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics. The institute noted that revoking China's PNTR status would result in higher inflation and a short-term decline in U.S. gross domestic product relative to baseline levels from which the economy might not recover due to an uneven loss of output and employment.
Cotton is a U.S. Senator from Arkansas, as noted on his Senate website. He serves as a member of several committees, including the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he is the Ranking Member for the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice and Counterterrorism, as well as the Intelligence Committee and Armed Services Committee, where he is the Ranking Member of the Air Land Power Subcommittee.
