From his presidential campaign to the trade war with China to tariffs on allies, Donald Trump shattered the free-trade consensus of the post–Cold War era. President Joe Biden has largely preserved Trump’s trade agenda and, in some cases, expanded it. The Inflation Reduction Act’s removal of subsidies from Hyundai’s electric cars, for example, has aroused the ire of South Korea’s trade minister, who recalls Biden previously telling Hyundai’s chairman, “I will not let you down.”
Numerous commentators have sought to defend this new bipartisan consensus against freer trade. Citing Alexander Hamilton and arguing that “the principal tradition of free trade one finds in American history was born in the Confederate South,” conservative activist John A. Burtka IV neatly encapsulates the protectionists’ version of American history: “America grew wealthy not from free trade, but behind some of the world’s most imposing protectionist barriers.” Meantime, influential economists such as Daron Acemoglu and left-wing organizations such as the Roosevelt Institute have called for Biden to employ “carbon tariffs” to combat global warming, updating the protectionist playbook for the twenty-first century.
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