Pool/ABACA/PA Images. All rights reserved.Of the many reasons for a rational person to look upon the Trump presidency with anxiety, ‘protectionism’ frequently appears at the top of the list in the mainstream media. The Independent quoted an executive of a large mining consortium warning us of “global trauma” should the new president fulfil his promise to introduce tariffs. Some progressive commentators seem to share the protectionist anxiety. In response to Trump’s declaration that “protection will lead to great prosperity and strength,” the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland told his readers that this assertion is “in defiance of the historical experience that says protection leads, in fact, to crisis and world war.”
Given the seriousness of these warnings, their validity bears investigation. The analytical basis for the ‘protectionism leads to disaster among nations’ argument comes from a book by Norman Angell published in 1910, The Great Illusion. He argued that warfare gained nothing (“the great illusion”), because wealth comes from trade among countries, not conquest of territory.
Angell’s book and his hypothesis suffered from unfortunate timing. Just four years after his extolling the peaceful virtues of international commerce, the most destructive war in history broke out among the trade-integrated nations of Europe. Despite this apparently definitive empirical rejection, the trade-prevents-war argument continues to find support, along with the obverse argument made by Freedland, that disrupting trade provokes conflict.
