There is a certain symmetry in the fact that President Donald Trump would target some of the United States' closest allies with high tariffs in this, the 70th-anniversary year of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.
GATT was the precursor to today's World Trade Organization and an institutional product of American postwar foreign policy. For seven decades, a bipartisan consensus has held that the United States has more to gain by expanding the circle of partners with which it trades as freely as possible. Trump has rejected that consensus, claiming that it was actually a kind of corrupt bargain among denationalized elites, American, European and Asian.
There is great political risk in what Trump is doing and in how he is doing it.
Long-range thinking is needed to identify the political stakes. Those have to do with the international peace and stability and human progress that may come from U.S. orchestration on terms of reciprocity of the global economy. Trading patterns have not always matched that ideal; China's accession to the WTO, in particular, has not tamed that country's mercantilist policies as American advocates once thought it would. After 70 years, it would be surprising if the WTO and related arrangements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement did not need an update to include negotiations in which the United States plays more hardball than it has in the past.
Trump goes beyond hardball to bad faith. The national-security exception to tariff-reducing international trade rules is and was meant to be applied narrowly and sparingly, lest the exception swallow the rules. Trump applies it promiscuously: It is simply not true, for example, that aluminum imports from Canada--officially recognized by the Defense Department as part of the U.S. "defense industrial base"-- threaten national security.
Perhaps U.S. allies will do some or all of Trump's bidding; there is still time to head off a trade war. Either way, however, the trust in U.S. leadership that took generations to build will have been dangerously eroded.
Editorial on 06/04/2018