We Didn’t Start the Trade War—We’ve Just Finally Joined It

April 6, 2025 by 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The prevailing orthodoxy treats tariffs as anathema to prosperity—an outdated relic of 19th-century mercantilism.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.

Trump’s critics are wrong. These tariffs aren’t a calamity. They’re a much-needed course correction

Reciprocity or Ruin

Let’s begin with the fundamental imbalance: the United States has long maintained one of the lowest average tariff rates among developed countries. Meanwhile, our “allies” in Europe and Asia—who rely on U.S. military protection for security—shield their markets with stubbornly high tariffs on American goods.

Germany taxes U.S. automobiles at four times the rate we impose on theirs. France blocks U.S. agricultural products through protectionist quotas and Byzantine regulations. And South Korea—despite a ‘free trade’ agreement—maintains tariff and non-tariff barriers on U.S. beef, pork, and automotive parts.

These aren’t historical artifacts of little significance. They are systemic disadvantages designed to extract concessions from America while giving little or nothing in return.

Trump’s tariffs expose the lie at the heart of globalist dogma: that trade liberalization is a rising tide that lifts all boats. It does not. This is particularly true when so-called free trade is, in fact, one-sided. The bitter truth is that our national trade structure has lifted luxury yachts in Shanghai and luxury sedans in Bavaria while hollowing out the steel mills, machine shops, and Ohio and Missouri factory towns.

Reindustrialization or Strategic Decline

The larger context is even more damning. The United States no longer makes what it needs. We’ve offshored our factories, outsourced our supply chains, and surrendered our economy's core sectors to competitors and adversaries.

China controls 80% of rare earth mineral processing—vital for semiconductors, missile systems, and EV batteries. India, Mexico, and Israel dominate the production of generic pharmaceuticals. Europe plays gatekeeper for critical aerospace components. And all the while, we’re told by The Economist and The Atlantic to be grateful—for cheap TVs and a “service economy.”

But what happens when the services are automated, the data centers are in Ireland, the code is written in Bangalore, and the medicine is manufactured in Wuhan?

We don’t need more seminars on Ricardian comparative advantage. We need a policy that recognizes that national power depends on national production. A nation that can’t produce steel, energy, antibiotics, and semiconductors is not prepared for a 21st-century conflict—whether that conflict is economic, cyber, or kinetic.

Trump’s strategy isn’t to make tariffs permanent. It’s to use them as leverage—spikes to extract long-overdue reductions in foreign tariffs on American exports and restore industrial equilibrium. This is not protectionism for protectionism’s sake. It is conditional retaliation, calibrated to coerce—not collapse—the system. It is realpolitik in economic form: painful, yes, but potentially transformative.

As explained here, many of the loudest critics of Trump’s tariffs operate on a shallow and one-sided understanding of trade. In practice, what they call “free trade” has become a rigged system that rewards strategic economies and penalizes open ones.

(For a deeper look at how foreign nations exploit loopholes in U.S. trade policy—deliberately through third-party proxies—see my March op-ed, “How Mexico Became China’s Trojan Horse in U.S. Trade.”)

The Consumption Trap

Too many in the commentariat confuse GDP growth with national strength. But growth driven by consumption, financed by debt, and fueled by foreign production is a Ponzi scheme disguised as prosperity. America’s so-called “consumer-driven” economy is now a treadmill of imports: we buy goods made elsewhere, pay with borrowed dollars, and watch foreign shareholders and governments reap the profits.

Even our technology sector hailed as the last bastion of innovation, relies on overseas fabrication and cloud infrastructure that escapes U.S. taxation and labor costs.

In essence, we’ve become the world’s most efficient economic colony—consuming goods we no longer make, patrolling seas we no longer dominate, and outsourcing our jobs and judgment to multinational boards, supranational bureaucrats, and foreign—often adversarial—governments.

This is not sustainable. It is not sovereign. And it is not conservative.

The False Idolatry of Globalism

The shrillest critics of Trump’s tariffs are not defenders of the American worker or champions of industrial renewal. They are the high priests of a globalist order that has enriched multinational corporations, empowered foreign rivals, and decimated communities from Youngstown to Yuma.

Their objection isn’t that tariffs won’t work—it’s that tariffs threaten a status quo they have spent decades engineering.

They invoke ‘rules-based order’ as if it were the Magna Carta. However, they remain silent as China floods markets with subsidized steel or as the EU weaponizes environmental standards to block American liquefied natural gas—only to turn around and buy more gas from Russia, the putative pariah state they expect the United States to protect them from.

This is no reckless escalation—it’s a long-overdue response to decades of economic surrender.

A New Trade Doctrine Focused on Putting Americans First

Sound economic doctrine must do more than chant “free trade” like early medieval plainsong. It must distinguish between open markets and open veins. It must recognize national sovereignty, security, and self-sufficiency as the flying buttresses of national survival. And it must be willing to act—not merely theorize—when the global trade regime becomes a conduit for exploitation and decline.

Trump’s tariffs are not a rejection of trade. They are a declaration that America will no longer trade away its future or redistribute its wealth to friends and foes alike. For too long, our leaders treated foreign tariffs as facts of life, and American decline as the inevitable cost of doing business. No more.

In the end, tariffs are neither a cure-all nor a calamity. They are a tool—a sharp one—to defend American interests in a world that has long taken our naiveté for granted.

It’s long past time we used them.

Charlton Allen is an attorney, former chief executive officer, and chief judicial officer of the North Carolina Industrial Commission. He is the founder of the Madison Center for Law & Liberty, Inc., editor of The American Salient, and the host of the Modern Federalist podcast. X: @CharltonAllenNC