Humility in the face of complexity; preservation over reinvention.
I t has always struck me as odd that the most thoughtful advocates of protectionism within the conservative movement also tend to be the fiercest advocates of non-interventionism. Patrick Buchanan famously embodied this synthesis for a while, and much of the New Right embodies it today, but the pairing of these ideas dates back to pre-Cold War conservatives like Robert Taft and the America Firsters.
On the face of it, protectionism and non-interventionism share a common foundational belief: America should have less to do with the world that surrounds it. But there is an inherent tension between the two.
The most intelligent protectionists do not see trade as inherently bad. Instead, they argue that the impersonal market forces that drive international trade patterns lack any regard for geopolitics. A policy of targeted protectionism via tariffs and other import restrictions, proponents argue, is needed to make the international distribution of trade and production better fit with America’s strategic interests. Critical industries can be brought home or shifted to allied nations, rather than left in the hands of adversaries. Bilateral economic relationships can be favorably rebalanced. Blocs can be formed to isolate bad actors. In short, the United States can utilize tariffs to make a dangerous world more hospitable.
This confidence in America’s ability to unilaterally rearrange the global economic order to its benefit is strange, then, coming from people who have no confidence in America’s ability to unilaterally rearrange the global security order to its benefit. Which is what foreign interventionism aims to do, relying upon a similarly blunt tool — military force — as protectionists have in tariffs.
Muscular interventionism, even when practiced by self-described conservatives, is born of a progressive ambition to remake the world. Woodrow Wilson believed that America could make the world “safe for democracy” by becoming its moral guide, turning autocratic countries into democratic ones. In the 21st century, interventionists have sought to reform the Middle East from the bottom up. It was not enough for the United States to contain, deter, and defeat its immediate enemies. “For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny,” George W. Bush proclaimed in his second inaugural address, “violence will gather, and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat.” Therefore, to guard itself truly, America would have to “seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”
The non-interventionists told the interventionists then: You are not nearly adept enough to get this right. No one is. The world, made up of hundreds of nations — each with its own relationships, internal factions, political dynamics, and distinct characteristics — is far too complex to rearrange without mucking things up. Wilson’s comprehensive effort to make the world “safe for democracy” from his perch at Versailles failed in epic fashion. The arrogant map drawers were to be humbled by the vicious revisions of Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, and imperial Japan.
Further vindication arrived early in the 21st century, when it became clear that the U.S. military and its planners could turn neither Afghanistan nor Iraq into self-sustaining democracies. The invasion of Iraq replaced the rule of a dictator with a power vacuum, which was quickly filled by insurgency. New threats emerged, like the Islamic State, that American policymakers had never anticipated. The United States tried intervention once more in Libya in 2011, replacing yet another despot with yet another power vacuum. Islamic radicals sprang up there, too. In both Iraq and Libya, the U.S. military had to go back in to clean up the messes it left behind.
In dealing with the world, critics of interventionism have stressed humility in the face of complexity: Nobody knows how this will turn out, so we really ought to be careful. Military adventures designed to bolster our national security can end up weakening it. They appear to have had the winning argument. On trade, however, too many non-interventionists forget their own wisdom. They believe that tariffs — like troops and bombs — can be wielded effectively in reshaping the world order.
If there is anything more complicated than the global security order, it’s the global economic order. Supply chains are unbelievably intricate, with materials often crossing national borders many times before reaching their final destination. On its own, the United States imports and exports more than $5 trillion worth of goods each year. We trade with over 200 countries, each purchasing and selling widely varying quantities of thousands of product types. That’s not even mentioning the trillions of dollars in services trade, international travel, and foreign investment that the country engages in. Our trading system — much like the inner workings of the Middle East — is impossible for any set of policymakers to comprehend. Yet protectionists nonetheless assume that they can steer our trade relationships in a better strategic direction. Reality has put that assumption to the test.
Protectionists have long advocated tariffs on steel to foster greater domestic production of a metal crucial to national security. Under the Trump administration, the government taxes all imported steel at 50 percent. As expected, U.S. companies must now pay much more for steel than firms in other countries. Steel production may be stimulated as a result, but the production of ships, tanks, and submarines certainly will not be. Did protectionists consider what happens when Chinese defense contractors can procure far more steel for their dollars than American contractors can?
Some have suggested using our new 50 percent tariff on Brazil as leverage to negotiate a beneficial deal, such as a trade bloc that ices out China. But we are also waging a rather large trade war against China, and the CCP has responded with its own retaliatory tariffs, including on American-grown soybeans. Now the Chinese are looking for new soybean suppliers, and the Brazilians — whose most-exported product happens to be soybeans — are looking for new foreign markets. Lo and behold, China and Brazil have elected to trade with each other much more than they did before the U.S. tariffs. Purportedly “strategic” protectionism has driven the two nations closer together, not further apart.
It has long been U.S. policy to diversify the country’s supply of manufactured goods away from China and toward other Asian countries. We’ve screwed that up by slapping high tariffs on every Asian nation besides China. But even back when this policy was “succeeding,” it wasn’t really. Previous tariffs on China — implemented by the first Trump administration and expanded by Biden — did reduce U.S. imports from China, with that trade moving to countries such as India, Thailand, and Vietnam. But Chinese goods never stopped coming to American ports. They were merely redirected through those other Asian countries first, effectively making them into China’s packaging centers for the U.S. market. Thus, we managed to not diminish our dependence on China while amplifying its economic influence over neighboring states.
Such problems will keep recurring under any protectionist policy; Hayek’s knowledge problem guarantees it. In other realms of foreign policy, the protectionists who are also non-interventionists prudently caution the U.S. government not to meddle in complex systems it doesn’t understand. They should apply that advice to trade as well. Indeed, there may be no greater strategic folly than launching a “global war on trade,” as Dan McLaughlin describes it, which will likely leave us economically isolated from the world’s most important theaters at a time when China is scrounging for every scrap of influence it can get. In an attempt to control international trade to our advantage, we may end up ceding the whole field to our chief geopolitical adversary.
The alternative to both protectionism and interventionism is an approach more in line with a conservative sensibility. It is to preserve the global security and economic orders that already exist, which, however imperfect, benefit America immensely. That means dealing with immediate threats to the security order as they materialize, such as fending off territorial aggression in Eastern Europe — or addressing acute economic vulnerabilities, as with rare earth minerals. It does not require a wholesale reconfiguration of the balance of power to preempt all conceivable hazards.
The post-WWII international orders are “rules-based,” in that they are undergirded by broadly applicable rules, not managed from above. Within those boundaries, innumerable diffuse decisions are made by countless sovereign actors.
This is how spontaneous order — or the “ordered liberty” that conservatives cherish — is achieved, and the free trading system that America helped build is a prime example. We should not try to fiddle with it, misguidedly assuming that we could arrange it better.