Time & Perspective Quote by Elizabeth Dole

Free trade gets the halo; enforcement gets the hammer. Dole’s line is built to hold both without admitting the contradiction: “free but fair” flatters market-friendly instincts while signaling she’s not naive about power. The pivot word “However” does the real work, licensing a tougher posture without renouncing the pro-trade brand that plays well with business constituencies and mainstream Republicans of her era.

The subtext is less about economics than about sovereignty and status. “Losing end” reframes trade policy as a scoreboard, not a system of mutual gains, making grievance feel objective and patriotic rather than ideological. “Agreements that are not enforced” is a polite way to accuse both foreign partners and U.S. leadership of negligence. It’s a critique that can point outward (China “cheating”) and inward (Washington not fighting), neatly expanding the target set while preserving plausible deniability.

Then comes the closing command: “make China play fairly.” The verb “make” implies leverage and readiness to escalate; “play” turns geopolitics into a game with rules, suggesting China is a bad actor, not just a competitor with different incentives. Context matters: this rhetoric tracks the bipartisan shift of the late 1990s and 2000s, when China’s WTO entry, manufacturing job losses, and rising trade deficits turned “engagement” into “enforcement.” Dole’s intent is to occupy the middle lane: pro-globalization in principle, hawkish in practice, and calibrated to capture voters who like open markets until they feel played.