Free Trade Is Dead

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

61% : The leaders of both major parties have now turned away from unfettered free trade, a fact that would have been unimaginable less than a decade ago.
59% : The same year, a landmark paper was published showing that free trade with China had cost more than 1 million American manufacturing workers their jobs and plunged factory towns across the country into ruin -- a phenomenon known as the "China shock."
55% : These are the terms on which the debate is now being waged: not whether to restrict free trade, but where, how, and how much.
52% : The political-economic approach also acknowledges that foreign adversaries behave in ways that bear little resemblance to the rational economic self-interest presupposed by mathematical models.
48% : According to this way of thinking, free trade wouldn't just make countries rich; it would also make the world more peaceful, as nations linked by a shared economic fate wouldn't dare wage war against one another.
44% : The basic idea is that economic policy can't just be a matter of numbers on a spreadsheet; it must take political realities into account.
42% : To simply accept cheap Chinese exports under the banner of free trade would solidify that dominance, giving Beijing effective control over the energy system of the future.
42% : Trump favors a blunt approach; he has proposed a 60 percent tariff on all Chinese goods and a 10 percent tariff on foreign goods from any country, including allies.
40% : Michael Schuman: China has gotten the trade war it deservesThese shifts strengthened the position of critics of globalization and laissez-faire capitalism.
36% : A political-economic approach to free trade recognizes that those two forces aren't symmetrical: Concentrated economic loss can create the kind of simmering resentment that can be exploited by demagogues, as Trump long ago intuited.
35% : Biden quietly kept in place the tariffs Trump had imposed on China (which Biden himself had denounced on the campaign trail), but he focused his economic agenda primarily on boosting the domestic clean-energy industry.
33% : Rather than attacking the tariffs, Trump claimed credit for them, telling a crowd in New Jersey that "Biden finally listened to me," and declaring that he, Trump, would raise tariffs to 200 percent.
25% : (Trump has made the threat of Chinese EVs central to his 2024 campaign, talking about the "bloodbath" that would ensue if they were allowed into the country.)
23% : The first major rupture took place in 2016, when Donald Trump ascended to the presidency in part by railing against NAFTA and attacking America's leaders for shipping jobs overseas.

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