Leadership Quote by David Bonior

“China” here isn’t just a country; it’s a stand-in for a whole critique of late-20th-century trade optimism. David Bonior’s phrasing is built to puncture the sunny rhetoric that sold globalization to American voters: the promise that rules, contracts, and “engagement” would steadily pull Beijing toward fairer play. Instead, he frames a decade-long record as a pattern of bad faith, and he does it with the blunt arithmetic of politics: “any other trade agreements” and “over the last decade” compress nuance into a prosecutable timeline.

The line’s real target is closer to home. “They don’t have any compliance or enforcement” reads like an indictment of China, but it’s also a warning about American self-deception and policy design. Bonior is foregrounding a structural asymmetry: trade deals can look reciprocal on paper while functioning as one-sided commitments if enforcement is toothless, slow, or politically inconvenient. The subtext is that the U.S. signed agreements it couldn’t or wouldn’t police, then acted surprised when the incentives played out exactly as predicted.

Context matters: this is the language of a Democratic trade skeptic from an era when NAFTA-style liberalization split the party between labor-aligned populists and pro-trade centrists. Bonior’s intent is to delegitimize “trust-the-process” trade diplomacy by reframing it as a governance problem, not a moral one: absent credible enforcement, agreements aren’t agreements, they’re aspirations. The sharpness is strategic; it invites voters to reclassify “free trade” from inevitability to choice, and from abstract economics to accountability.