As usual we need to put two and two together for these announcements.
- The biggest, highest profile provision of the deal is the raised limit on the number of cars each American manufacturer can sell in Korea. However, no American manufacturer has come close to the current limit.
- American auto manufacturers have recently made clear how interested they are in foreign markets. The industry’s lobbying group—the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers—recently released a report full of fabricated challenges to the idea of climate change in support of a regulatory request for relief from new auto emissions and fuel economy standards.
In other words they’d rather come up with the next SUV—a product niche initially unique to the US—than fight it out in the more competitive international market where such standards hold sway. (Even the Korean deal actually had to include an exemption from such rules, or we couldn’t sell anything!)
So we have theater instead of economic policy. Too bad we can’t just export media events.
on the outside 