LAND OF THE FREE (TRADERS):

For all of the bitching and bellyaching about NATO and German industrial policy, the nations of Western Europe remain, along with the United Kingdom, our most important allies. They are also important trading partners. In the much (and stupidly) maligned NAFTA arrangement, the United States has a fruitful and functional trade accord with Canada (which has fewer people than California) and Mexico (average household income less than $9,000 a year), but we have no such agreement with either the European Union or the United Kingdom. We have no agreement with India, an increasingly important economic and strategic partner -- even though such an agreement would have made it more attractive for Harley-Davidson to ship U.S.-made motorcycles to India rather than set up an Indian factory, as it did. India has made great progress in the past 20 years, but go spend a month there and tell me whether you really think its backward, protectionist trade policies are helping its people get rich at the expense of Milwaukee.

With all due concern for the necessity of policing the border, Americans have always been about roads, not walls: Gene Autry never sang "Please Fence Me In." Rather than putting up barriers to exchange, the United States ought to be pursuing free-trade deals wherever they are to be had, especially with the economically advanced and politically liberal nations that are our most natural allies and -- not a trivial concern -- whose people are the most likely to have the money to buy the stuff we make and to make the stuff we need. But our economic interests are wider than our immediate political interests: Almost all of the Trump tariffs on Chinese products will land on capital goods, i.e. on stuff U.S. manufacturers need to make the stuff they make, and the retaliatory Chinese tariffs will land primarily on U.S. farm exports. The Chinese don't buy shiploads of American soybeans because they love us -- we're the best producer at the best price. But we aren't the only producer.

We have very little to fear and much to gain from more open trade relations with the rest of the world.

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