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Some people argue that the House Democratic leadership’s refusal to hold a vote on the Colombia trade deal has nothing to do with an intelligent assessment of U.S. interests. They say that it is really just an expression of bitterness and frustration after seven years of George W. Bush’s presidency. I see a germ of truth in this. The Democrats have every right to be bitter, and if their judgment is a little warped as a result, who can blame them? (I hope that does not sound condescending.)

So far as the Colombia trade pact itself is concerned, there are the merits, which I will come to in a moment, and there is the politics. The administration, just like Congress, evidently cares more about the latter. In sending the agreement for an expedited vote under the terms of its fast-track negotiating authority (now defunct, by the way, for future negotiations), the administration had no plausible hope of success. The House was always going to vote the deal down or—the lesser evil—find a way to avoid voting on it at all until further notice, which is what happened.

The Democratic Party’s presidential candidates are vying to outdo each other in their hostility to trade (“which deal did you oppose, and when did you oppose it?”). Congressional Democrats feel much the same. To get this agreement ratified, the administration therefore had to offer Congress something in return. Maybe the White House thought it had. The deal was revised a year ago to strengthen protections on labor and environmental issues that the Democrats had highlighted. But in the new anti-trade climate, that concession was not enough. Rather than undertake another round of revisions, the administration demanded a vote.

Having done so, it got the result it probably expected—and by now perhaps wanted, because the blocking of the agreement presented Republicans with the opportunity to attack the Democrats as knee-jerk trade-bashers and bad allies as well. In the unlikely event that Congress had approved the deal, the administration would have been able to watch Democrats throughout the country savage their representatives and accuse them of craven submission (again) to the Bush White House. In that sense, you could call Bush’s move good politics. It forced Democrats to choose between opposing a deal they have no good grounds for opposing (which is what they did), or accepting a deal they have coached their supporters to deplore.

No doubt, the prospects for getting the deal approved would have been better if the administration had been willing to bend again and meet the Democrats halfway on beefed-up trade-adjustment assistance. Perhaps the agreement even now can be unfrozen in this way. The combination of liberal trade and a better safety net for the minority of Americans who are disadvantaged by it—the second is something Democrats have long been pushing for—is in fact the right approach to the issue. But the White House will not go there. The accelerating protectionist drift in American trade policy is mainly the Democrats’ doing, but for this reason the other side deserves some of the blame, too.

All this aside, the fact remains that, with or without new trade-adjustment assistance, the deal the Democrats have chosen to block is a good one for both countries. What a shame that this seems to count for so little.

As widely noted, almost all of Colombia’s exports to the United States enter the country tariff-free already, under the terms of existing trade preferences dating back many years. In other words, the United States has already adjusted to the stress of trading with the mighty Colombian economy. The tariffs that get lowered by this deal are all on the Colombian side. If you are a card-carrying mercantilist—as most politicians, regardless of party, are—and you think that exports are good and imports are bad, there is nothing about the economics of this deal for the United States to dislike. U.S. exporters would gain access to more of Colombia’s market, at no cost in new access for Colombian exporters.

In that case, you might ask, what is in it for Colombia? From an economic point of view, the main thing is that the agreement would cement the existing U.S. preferences, so that they would no longer keep coming up for review. Colombia’s government believes that lessening the doubt about its future trade relations with the United States would improve the climate for inward foreign investment—and that seems likely to be true. (See “Looking Beyond Juan Valdez,” p. 71.)

It is also true that estimates of the costs and benefits of this (and every other) trade deal are contested. In a column for Reuters, Kevin Gallagher, an international-relations scholar at Boston University, called the agreement “one of the most deeply flawed trade pacts in U.S. history. It will hardly make a dent in the U.S. economy, [and] looks to make the Colombian economy worse off.” In support of this view, he cites a 2007 study from United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean.

If you are a card-carrying mercantilist—as most politicians, regardless of party, are—there is nothing about the economics of this deal for the United States to dislike.

These sorts of studies make a distinction between the static and dynamic gains from trade liberalization. The static gains (or losses) arise directly from the lowering of tariffs. This alters prices and affects patterns of demand and supply. In estimating the dynamic gains (or losses), economists also try to take account of longer-term effects from changes in investment, which reshape the economy over time.

For what it’s worth, the U.N. study does say—as you would expect—that the Colombia deal would have a negligible (albeit positive) effect on the United States. It could hardly be otherwise, because Colombia is so small. Why this conclusion would lead the U.S. to reject the deal is hard to see. More surprisingly, it also says, as Gallagher mentions, that Colombia would suffer static losses as a result of new competition in its home markets from the U.S. But the study then goes on to give its best guess of the longer-term dynamic effect on Colombia—which is that the country would gain. As for withdrawing the preferences Colombia already enjoys in the U.S. market—the thing Colombia most wants to avoid—that would indeed make Colombia worse off, according to this study, whether you measure the effect in static or dynamic terms.

This comment from the report is worth noting as well: The study “has not examined the economic changes that could be promoted by other active public policies (including institution-building, promotion of competitiveness, improvement of infrastructure, training of human resources, and protection of the environment and natural resources). While these policies could (and should) be implemented even if there are no FTAs, their effects would be greater if free-trade agreements existed.”

Call me biased, but these observations do not seem to add up to an attack on the Colombia trade deal—let alone justify the claim that this is “one of the most deeply flawed trade pacts in U.S. history.”

Attention elsewhere has focused on Colombian human-rights abuses. John Sweeney, head of the AFL-CIO, wrote in The Washington Post of increasing “extrajudicial murders of civilians by the Colombian armed forces on [President Alvaro] Uribe’s watch.” Groups such as Human Rights Watch say that the Uribe government is doing too little to control and dismantle paramilitary groups that are killing trade unionists and others. But many other observers, by no means limited to supporters of the Bush administration, strongly disagree, and credit the democratically elected Uribe government with bringing the country back from murderous anarchy. It is making real progress in reducing violence, corruption, and lawlessness, they say. And they point out that Colombia is a leading U.S. ally in a region where Washington is short of friends.

Under Uribe, the Colombian economy is doing better: Poverty and unemployment are down, growth is up (to approximately 7 percent in both 2006 and 2007), and incomes are rising. The government has a chance to build on this success—and it sees the trade agreement as a central part of that effort.

A New York Times editorial in support of the pact last week quoted from a letter that “a group of congressional heavyweights from the Clinton administration and previous Congresses” had sent to Democrats on Capitol Hill: “Walking away from the Colombia trade agreement or postponing it until conditions are perfect would send an unambiguous signal to our friends and opponents alike that the United States is an unreliable partner without a vision for co-operation in our hemisphere.” That sounds right.

Aside from Democrats in Congress and the country—and Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton—the most enthusiastic supporter of this defeat for liberal trade is surely Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s leftist president and would-be leader of Latin America. What a gift. You see what happens when you rely on the United States?