China's growing military gets a major share of its funding from the country's state-run tobacco monopoly, which has quietly — and illegally — grabbed half the United States vaping market in recent years, providing the People’s Republic with a whopping 7 percent of its annual government revenue. By itself, that covers the country’s entire military budget.
Now a federal agency, the U.S. International Trade Commission, appears to be preparing to issue a decision that would effectively hand China the other half of the U.S.’ vaping market. That outcome clearly raises major national security and public-interest concerns that the ITC should consider in its decision.
But the ITC appears strangely unconcerned with real-world trade impacts on Americans from foreign bad actors. It's time for that to change.
For those who don't know much about it, the ITC is a federal agency that decides a wide range of trade-related disputes.
It was created back in 1916 for the laudable purpose of protecting Americans from unfair trade practices by foreign exporters.
In practice — because so much business nowadays involves American companies manufacturing goods and materials overseas — the ITC has become yet another place for U.S. businesses to battle each other for competitive advantage, using trade rules as a weapon.
That is exactly what is happening in this case, where one familiar U.S. vaping brand — JUUL Labs — is going after its legal, FDA-approved U.S. competition.
Up until June, the FDA banned JUUL products; now, it says it is re-reviewing the matter. However, now, JUUL is cleverly trying to have the ITC ban its American-made rivals. If its ITC power play is successful, the U.S. government will effectively be handing over another huge chunk of the American vaping market to illicit Chinese brands that are already flooding U.S. stores.
That would also mean another giant cash windfall for the Chinese Communist Party and in turn the Chinese military.
To say that doing JUUL’s bidding — outlawing its legal American competition — would be an asinine move would be the understatement of the year. While this industry already produces 7 percent of China’s annual government revenue, the country created a State Tobacco Monopoly Administration to help it increase riches for the People’s Liberation Army and other government initiatives even further.
The U.S. already provides this state-owned State Tobacco Monopoly Administration with billions of dollars annually. Shouldn’t it be seeking to decrease these handouts to the CCP, not increase them?
Inexplicably, though, the ITC has an extremely poor record when it comes to weighing the American public interest in its decisions — even though protecting the American public interest is its entire reason for existence.
Its enabling statute clearly requires that the ITC take into account public interest factors in its decisions about trade disputes.
However, the statute doesn't give much guidance for how those public-interest factors should be weighed. Possibly for that reason, the ITC has decided cases based on public-interest factors only three times, out of hundreds of investigations since 1975.
At a time when China is using business and commerce — and dirty tactics — to try to replace the U.S. as the world's most powerful country, it is well past time for the ITC to begin exercising its public-interest authority responsibly.
That's especially true when U.S. voters have just chosen a presidential candidate who explicitly made "America First" his campaign's central theme.
So far, the federal response to China flooding the U.S. market with unapproved and often illegal flavored e-cigarettes has been haphazard.
About a year ago, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced the seizure of about 1.4 million units of unauthorized e-cigarette products. Those included products such as Elf Bar, reportedly the most popular brand among younger U.S. e-cigarette users, in flavors like "Pineapple Coconut Ice."
Despite the occasional seizure, the flooding of the U.S. market with illegal Chinese e-cigarettes continues more or less unabated.
Handing over more of the market is certain to harm public interest further by undermining the effectiveness of U.S. efforts to control the e-cigarette market and reduce youth addiction.
To fulfill its mission of protecting the U.S., the ITC must begin honoring its mandate to consider the public interest. It should start with the JUUL case, where the public interest is threatened in so many ways.
Stacy Washington (@StacyOnTheRight) is an ambassador for the America First Policy Institute and a frequent guest on Fox News. She is also an Air Force veteran, the CEO of Share Net Ministries, and the host of Stacy on the Right on SiriusXM Patriot Channel 125,