Moreover, the only leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination to oppose the currency bill is Rick Perry, the conservative Texas governor who is close to the Tea Party. The relatively centrist Mitt Romney supported the currency legislation – and so, remarkably, did Jon Huntsman, former ambassador to China and usually an advocate of constructive engagement rather than confrontation with Beijing.
Still, while the Republican law¬makers’ stance is at least enabling the bilateral pacts to crawl through Congress, ideological and partisan divides are preventing coherent international economic policy from being formed on other fronts.
One of the fiercest fights has been over fiscal policy. The protracted and heated discussions over raising the federal debt ceiling in August, which led to the first sovereign credit downgrade in US history, are likely to be repeated when the government needs fresh funding in November.