Tariff Truths: What They Don’t Tell You About Global Trade
Trade Without Reciprocity Is Surrender by Another Name
While the chattering class wails over Donald Trump’s promise to reassert tariffs as a tool of national power, one might ask a simple question: Why is America the only country expected to play by free trade’s rules?
The globalist gospel—that the United States must keep her markets wide open while competitors wall off theirs—is not just misguided. It is self-destructive.
Let’s look at the ledger.
Mexico imposes a 7% tariff on American goods. We charge them just 2.4%. Canada hits us with 4.2%—we respond with 1.9%. And then there’s China, our most brazen rival, throwing up a tariff wall of 17.5%. Only recently have we begun to match them. But only after a generation of industrial surrender.
Japan, Germany, France, Britain—all benefit from access to the U.S. consumer while quietly shielding their own industries. These are the same nations that once relied on American GIs to liberate their soil. Today, they exploit the American worker in the name of a “rules-based order.”
This isn’t free trade. It’s economic masochism.
The Forgotten Tradition of Tariff Nationalism
When Alexander Hamilton penned his Report on Manufactures in 1791, he didn’t envision an America dependent on cheap imports from authoritarian rivals. He understood what today’s free traders ignore: A nation that cannot feed, fuel, and manufacture for itself cannot long remain free.
Tariffs built this country.
They protected emerging industries, lifted wages, and laid the foundation for the arsenal of democracy that defeated fascism and communism. But in the postwar era, our elites embraced globalism—outsourcing jobs to Shenzhen, surrendering sovereignty to Geneva.
Who Profits from Free Trade?
Wall Street. The multinationals. Ivy League think tanks that have never set foot inside a factory or walked the floor of a plant. Certainly not the American steelworker, farmer, or machinist who’s seen wages stagnate and hometowns wither.
Free trade promised prosperity. What it delivered was a Rust Belt, a fentanyl crisis, and a forgotten middle class.
Trump didn’t launch a trade war—he called a ceasefire in a decades-long assault on American labor.
Restoring Economic Sovereignty
We don’t need a trade war. We need trade justice. A level field—country by country, tariff by tariff. If Mexico wants access to our markets, let them match our openness. If Germany wants to sell us cars, they can buy our beef.
We are not a colony. We are not a dumping ground. We are a sovereign republic.
It’s time we acted like it.