Charlton Allen
When President Donald Trump slapped a fresh round of tariffs on European and Asian imports, the professional hand-wringers and legacy press clodpolls sprang into choreographed action.
Headlines and television anchors blared warnings of trade wars, economic isolation, and diplomatic fallout. The bureaucratic priesthood that worships at the altar of “free trade” without reciprocity—from Brussels to Brookings—launched into familiar homilies: tariffs are regressive, Trump is reckless, and globalism is gospel.
But let’s pause the hysteria momentarily and apply something vanishingly rare in today’s media-industrial complex: perspective.
The prevailing orthodoxy treats tariffs as anathema to prosperity—an outdated relic of 19th-century mercantilism. But this overlooks a simple truth: for trade to be free, it must also be fair. For decades, American policymakers—both Democrats and Republicans—have tolerated a grotesquely asymmetrical global trade regime that has hollowed out the American industrial base and made us dangerously dependent on foreign powers, friend and foe alike.
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