Free Trade Fundamentalism Must Give Way to National Greatness
Members of the old guard conservative movement are still pledging their fealty to the stale economic pieties of the pre-Trump Republican Party.
Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts ignited the wrath of this clique after announcing his support of the principal aims of President Trump’s trade policies, including the deployment of tariffs to counter the unfair trading practices of countries like China. In a thread on X, Roberts made the case that it’s necessary to end “outdated trade policies that harm hard-working Americans” and implement ones that will benefit America and her citizens. He praised Trump’s general trade strategy for seeking to accomplish four major goals: 1) “Demanding fairness and reciprocity,” 2) “Creating respect for our borders, 3) “Keeping friends close and enemies far,” and 4) “Putting American families and workers first, always.”
While the old guard is reduced to making ad hominem attacks, most of the Right has fortunately broken free of the stale bromides and clichés that went for wisdom for so long in modern conservatism. The constant repetition of buzzwords like “entrepreneurship” and “competition” from strident free marketers was always rhetoric in search of real solutions. The dogmatic assertions that came from the mouths of Republicans led to political defeats, decimated communities, rising deaths of despair, and American workers being left behind.
Roberts’s breaking free of free market fundamentalism—in which free trade is seemingly elevated to a principle rather than a specific outcome of policy—is a welcome change that acknowledges the world as it is in 2025. (In response to Trump’s most recent round of tariffs, a senior White House official has been quoted as saying that the post-World War II order is over.) Devising policies that acknowledge the political realities of a multipolar world is a sign of a healthy movement that’s yearning for national greatness.
Publicly backing tariffs is a notable shift for Roberts—and for Heritage more broadly, which speaks with one voice on policy. I worked for a year at Heritage under one of Roberts’s predecessors and can certainly attest that tariffs and other economic policies aimed at protecting the nation’s core interests were not popular (nor at the time was Trump).
Now, this doesn’t mean that Roberts, or anyone else who applauds Trump’s use of all available tools of statecraft that Republicans have historically wielded, must back each and every tariff the Trump administration levies. But it does signal a consequential shift for an important think tank on the Right. Changed circumstances demand new—or, in this case, old—strategies.
Liberation or Subjugation?
Of course, the jury is still out on the prudence of the “Liberation Day” reciprocal tariffs Trump announced in the Rose Garden on Wednesday afternoon. His administration will be imposing a 10% rate for all countries, along with higher rates for specific countries that the White House deems bad actors. According to the White House, these new tariffs are aimed at rebalancing lopsided trade deals, restoring manufacturing, rectifying trade deficits, and taking back America’s economic sovereignty. Seen as a negotiating tactic, the threat of Trump’s new tariffs already seems to be having its intended effect.
Domestically, General Motors has announced that they’re ramping up production of trucks at their plant in Fort Wayne, Indiana. For a limited time, Ford is making employee pricing available to any American who buys one of their vehicles.
Around the world, the looming tariffs are already causing nations to rethink their trade policies with the U.S. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that the country is canceling all tariffs on U.S. products. Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who’s unsurprisingly an ardent critic of Trump’s stance toward Canada, said on CNBC that if Trump takes down the tariffs, he’d remove tariffs on the U.S. Prime Minister Modi of India has been scrambling to reach a trade deal with Trump that could cut upwards of $23 billion on more than half of U.S. imports. Vietnam has lowered tariffs on “cars, liquefied gas, and certain agricultural products,” among other goods.
Using tariffs seems to be part of a far bigger, long-term strategy of the Trump administration. He’s not only seeking to change how the U.S. deals with its trading partners, but is looking to reorder the fundamentals of our economy. Rather than allowing critical industries to leave the country and the U.S. to get taken advantage of over and over again by other countries, Trump is looking to turn America once again into a national powerhouse. Booming domestic production, low trade deficits, higher wages, an economy that isn’t simply at the mercy of the stock market and top Wall Street investment firms, more opportunities for our citizenry to be financially independent—all of these are worthy long-term objectives.
While the principles guiding Trump’s motives on trade seem to be sound, the potential pitfalls in practice are legion. The intricate machinery that Trump, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and their advisors are attempting to tinker with will take a very deft hand, as hedge fund manager Ray Dalio pointed out in an excellent thread. Returning key supply chains to the United States is going to take patience and time. And in an age where imports are a far higher percentage of our GDP (nearly 14%) than they were when we had high tariffs in the early 20th century, for example, a sizable shock could lock us into an economic nosedive.
Also, will Trump and his team be able to successfully communicate with the American people regarding his overall strategy on trade? This is the chief worry of Oren Cass, the founder of American Compass. Just before Trump’s announcement, Cass wrote that the administration has yet to articulate its goals “as a coherent package, or establish their connection to the actions being taken, in a way that provides either domestic constituents and producers or foreign allies a roadmap to understand and follow.”
And what about the 2026 midterm elections? Though the Republicans have a favorable electoral map, the party in power loses 28 House seats and four Senate seats on average, according to the American Presidency Project. Trump needs to balance short-term financial hits to retirement plans (the stock market has predictably reacted very poorly) with ensuring that Americans begin seeing some tangible benefits sooner rather than later.
Rejecting Free Market Fundamentalism
The downsides to Trump’s new round of tariffs must be balanced with the positives of his regimen of tariffs. It cannot be overstated how important it is that his administration is breaking free of the bipartisan orthodoxies that have functioned as a series of rationalizations that have accompanied America’s managed decline.
Far too often, the glittering promises of “free trade” in practice have amounted to giveaways to other countries and carve-outs for post-patriotic, post-nation special interests. Michael Anton has noted that the “free trade dogmatism” of the Reagan era “paved the way for mass outsourcing, deindustrialization, and globalization.” We got cheaper TVs, but we traded away Middle America in the process.
Free trade ideology also has allowed Republicans, backed by an entire fleet of conservative commentators, to evade any responsibility for the disastrous effects of the political choices they made. Instead, they’ve been able to maintain their standing and sinecures by talking as if low wages and jobs moving overseas were the inevitable turning of history’s wheels—that nothing could be done politically to halt the hollowing out of the nation, a situation that they in fact helped cause in the first place.
If anyone, it should’ve been the Right that stood against the strong pull of ideology of any kind, even one that cloaks itself in free market rhetoric. Free trade, after all, is not itself a principle of natural right. Contrary to the reverent tones some conservatives use when they discuss free trade, it isn’t mentioned in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. (However, the Declaration certainly implies that fair trade between nations is a good to be sought after; one of the grievances the colonists laid against King George III was “cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world.”) At the intrepid Journal of American Greatness in early 2016, speaking for all the then-pseudonymous contributors there, Anton wrote, “We don’t object to free trade in principle. We object to the principle that free trade is a principle.”
Obtaining actual free trade with another nation is dependent on many shifting factors. While it’s undoubtedly a good thing if it can be accomplished, all trade should be viewed as a means to secure our nation’s preservation for our posterity. Nothing more, nothing less. As Pat Buchanan once stated, “The country comes before the economy, and the economy exists for the people.” Sometimes free trade will work; sometimes tariffs and other policies will need to be implemented as cudgels to move things in the right direction. This is the nature of politics.
The elevation of a particular goal of trade policy to the level of principle has done great harm to the United States, as is immediately evident when driving through any once-thriving Rust Belt town. And it also cuts against the American political tradition. Perhaps as a surprise to some, generations of American statesmen, from the American founders to political leaders of the mid-20th century, used tariffs and other tools of economic statecraft to support American industry.
In a report for the Heritage Foundation, Carson Holloway argued that the early American consensus “admitted the benefits of free trade, even seeing its necessity for our nation’s prosperity and power, but also saw the need for a governmental authority to regulate trade in order to protect America’s national interest.” Instead of approaching trade dogmatically, statesmen of that era viewed trade policy in a “pragmatic spirit. Their thinking about it was informed by theory, but they approached it as practical statesmen trying to balance a variety of considerations,” Holloway contends.
American statesmen from Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln, and William McKinley to Calvin Coolidge, Robert Taft, and Pat Buchanan also used or supported tariffs. Even Ronald Reagan deployed tariffs strategically “in service of opening foreign markets to fair competition from otherwise robust American competitive production,” according to Reagan biographer Steven F. Hayward.
The GOP was ardently pro-tariff from the party’s inception in the 1850s until at least the immediate post-World War II era. Claremont Review of Books editor Charles Kesler has noted that the Republican consensus around the turn of the 20th century was that tariffs “brought economic confidence, stability, and employment sufficient to maintain the middle class as the basis of American republicanism, and without a huge federal welfare state.” As a graduate professor of mine at Hillsdale College once said, tariffs are as American as apple pie.
None of this is an argument for a mirror image of free market ideology, that we must be in lockstep support of tariffs or other forms of economic nationalism, at all times. But it is to say that tariffs have historically been a tool of statecraft that many presidential administrations have used, which has been supported by presidential aides and congressmen, throughout American history. Quite simply, Trump’s use of tariffs in principle is not the issue.
Economists may despise that argument, but they shouldn’t always have the last word. Center for Renewing America CEO Eric Teetsel writes that while we should listen to what economists have to say, we shouldn’t “make the mistake of believing that economists have a monopoly” on what are ultimately political questions. Economics is one piece of a larger puzzle. The master art—politics—encompasses the complete good of a particular polity. Just as we should never let doctors determine health policy absent the authority of political actors, economists likewise shouldn’t be given the reins of economic policy.
In launching his new round of tariffs, President Trump has made perhaps the gamble of the 21st century: he’s staked his political reputation on his administration’s attempt to fundamentally transform American trade, and with it, the American economy. Making America Great Again was always going to be extremely difficult work, which is exactly the kind of task that the Great Men of History have always been asked to shoulder.
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