by J.B. Shurk, All News Pipeline:
President Trump, Treasury secretary Bessent, and Commerce secretary Lutnick are effectively teaching a course right now on the fundamentals of international trade. How many Americans previously understood that nations around the world use tariffs and other economic tools to keep American-made products from reaching their markets? Hasn’t the United States been spreading the gospel of “free trade” for centuries? Doesn’t commitment to “free markets” separate the civilizational West from more authoritarian countries with “closed” economies? Shouldn’t a “rules-based international order” ensure that the rules are the same for all participating countries?
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Or asked another way: How “free” can international trade be if its proponents depend upon a labyrinthine system of rules that requires thousand-page treaties and guidance from the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the Export-Import Bank of the United States, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, central banks galore, the Bank for International Settlements, international standards organizations, law firms specializing in commercial and maritime law, more law firms specializing in the administrative law of specific nations, even more law firms specializing in the labor and environmental laws of each nation, and an ever-increasing number of national and international regulatory bodies to tell producers what they can and cannot produce, how and when to produce what they are permitted to produce, and whom to pay for the “privilege” of producing it — all while restricting which domestic consumers around the world are permitted to purchase what the aforementioned producers end up producing?
That long question only scratches the surface of the sheer complexity of international trade, yet even in its oversimplification, it smacks of coercion, extortion, overbearing micromanagement, government corruption, and blatant racketeering. It oozes the “command and control” odor we associate with a Soviet-type, socialist, or similarly centrally planned economy. Nothing about “free trade” in practice sounds remotely free.
With the Trump/Bessent/Lutnick tariff tutorial currently being broadcast from the White House, millions of Americans are learning for the first time that the United States operates within an international market system that does not impose reciprocal entry costs. That is to say, countries around the world collect fees from American producers before they are allowed to sell their goods in those markets, while the U.S. typically charges foreign producers much less — or nothing at all.
Since the conclusion of WWII, the United States has directly subsidized Europe through various forms of a Marshall Plan, originally meant to help Europe rebuild after the war by restricting American competitors from selling in Europe while encouraging European producers to sell in the United States. Was the Marshall Plan necessary to resurrect Europe’s economy? Perhaps — although many economists have argued that it so distorted market incentives that Europe’s economy is much less strong today than it otherwise would be. Regardless, most Americans have been intentionally kept in the dark that this two-tiered system of trans-Atlantic trade has persisted for eighty years.
Europe is not alone in benefiting from “rules-based” trade advantages with the United States. The U.S. handcuffs its producers in numerous ways. If some country within America’s sphere of influence depends upon a particular agricultural crop or mineral export to sustain its national standard of living, then there is almost certainly a paragraph tucked away in the thirteenth section of the fifty-ninth chapter of some fourteen-hundred-page international treaty making it more difficult for American producers to grow, mine, ship, or sell that product to the other country’s detriment. That’s one form of what foreign policy snobs like to call “soft power.” It’s a way for the United States to exert influence by effectively saying, “If you do what we say, we’ll prop up your nation’s economy. And if you’re really obedient, the U.S. Agency for International Development or the National Endowment for Democracy will throw a little cold, hard cash at your political leaders.”
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