The US can't be protectionist and world leader
President Joe Biden likes to call the United States “the indispensable nation.” By that he means that America is the only power simultaneously mighty and benevolent enough to preserve whatever is left of a liberal order — one in which rules and multilateral institutions govern, among other things, a system of relatively free international finance and trade.
But what if the US itself, even under Biden, turns against the system it’s supposed to guard, becoming an agent of economic nationalism, international fragmentation and hostile bloc-building?
Doubts to that effect have popped up throughout the Pax Americana, the long period of US leadership that followed World War II. What most frightened America’s friends abroad, though, was Donald Trump in the White House. His “America First” worldview was a throwback to a much earlier US stance of isolationism and nationalism.
The infamous symbol of that older tradition was the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. Named after its sponsors, it hiked duties on America’s trading partners, thus making US consumers and importers poorer and foreign exporters angrier. Their governments “retaliated” (a stupid term, since they only impoverished their own importers out of spite) with tariffs against the US. And so it went, in round after round of “beggar-thy-neighbor” protectionism that made the Great Depression worse and nations more aggressive. Within a decade, the world was at war. The US Senate today calls Smoot-Hawley “among the most catastrophic acts in congressional history.”
Wit
