Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin is sounding confident an agreement will eventually be reached on trade between the U.S. and China.
China announced plans Friday to slap an additional $60 billion in new tariffs on unspecified American goods in response to escalating trade war threats from the Trump administration.
In a recent interview with Chinese network CGTN, Bevin said the U.S. must address a $375 billion-plus annual trade imbalance between the two nations, but appeared less concerned about the tariffs permanently damaging the relationship between the U.S and its largest single trading partner.
"I'm highly optimistic because I know that if we don't find resolution, both sides lose," the Republican governor said. "There is going to be change, no question. You can't have hundreds of billions of annual trade imbalance between major powers and expect not to have change."
According to theU.S. Census Bureau, the total exchange of goods between the U.S. and China amounted to $636 billion.
Bevin is slated to visit an expo in Shanghai in November to talk with potential business partners about opportunities for investment in Kentucky.
"There needs to be some kind of leveling, so that it's not just free trade but truly fair trade. That's at the high level. At the bottom level for folks like us, I want business to happen in Kentucky. I want jobs," Bevin explained.
The governor has repeatedly downplayed the potential harm rising tariffs could inflict on key Kentucky industries including bourbon and auto manufacturing, characterizing the fallout from the trade policy shakeup as a short term problem. It's a confidence not shared by Kentucky's senior U.S. senator, Mitch McConnell, who told the Louisville Courier-Journal in July that he's "not a fan of tariffs."
"We've been arguing aggressively that this is the wrong path for us," McConnell said. "The president does have the right to do what he's doing. He's not violating current trade policy."
China is currently Kentucky’s fourth largest trading partner, accounting for more than 9 percentof the state’s overall exports in 2017.
