Peter E. Harrell
Over the course of a year, U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has become the most disruptive force in global trade since the 1930s. But the destruction of the post–Cold War trade order—a rules-based international trading system that sought to set economic principles for participating governments—provides a necessary opportunity to correct an overly rigid attitude toward trade.
Between the end of World War II and the early 1990s, U.S. presidents generally supported free trade and encouraged other countries to lower trade barriers with initiatives such as the 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which encouraged countries mostly outside the Soviet bloc to mutually reduce their tariffs. But U.S. administrations balanced this preference with pragmatism, taking a flexible approach to policy that considered distinct challenges discretely. When necessary, U.S. presidents were willing to use tools such as tariffs, sector-specific deals for politically-sensitive products such as textiles, and hard-nosed negotiations to tackle discrete trade tensions. The idea that strictly governing international trade with a set of universal rules would deliver economic and geopolitical benefits to all countries is historically abnormal.
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