America, for its part, wants to maintain high tariffs on light trucks.
(America, for its part, wants to maintain high tariffs on imported pickup trucks).Mr Obama also left Malaysia empty-handed.
He was originally of the mind that government's role was to maintain high tariffs to advantage American products over cheap imports.
He became the principal investor in Bethlehem Steel, then successfully lobbied Congress to maintain high tariff walls against foreign steel.
The United States, Europe and Japan have succeeded in forcing others to reduce trade barriers in services and in the industrial goods they excel at producing, while maintaining high tariffs on imported agricultural goods.
He charged that the Bush administration had engaged in continuous abuse of the world trading system by having imposed duties on Chinese goods, maintained high tariffs and subsidies on many American products and restricted the export of high technology to China.
When they left, the French and Italian brands were fat and lazy, with huge domestic market shares that were practically guaranteed by their home governments, which maintained high tariffs between European countries.
In addition to farm subsidies, the United States, Europe, Japan and other countries maintain high agricultural tariffs that block imports and spend millions of dollars subsidizing their food exports.
Japan maintains high import tariffs and funnels about $4,500 in subsidies into each acre of farmland -- far more than Australia, Canada and the United States.
Just look at Europe, where a twin policy of maintaining high semiconductor tariffs and bailing out high-tech firms has helped to reduce the region's share of the world market for "electronic data products" (which includes computers) from 23% in 1988 to 18% in 1996.
