Can tariffs revive US manufacturing?

US President Trump says 'jobs and factories will come roaring back' because of his trade policies, but the economic story of the American 21st century has also been shaped by the pursuit of freer trade, writes Talmon Joseph Smith from New York

- TALMON JOSEPH SMITH

President Donald Trump's imposition of tariffs on a scale unseen in nearly a century is more than a shot across the bow at US trading partners. If kept in place, the import taxes will also launch an economic project of defiant nostalgia: an attempt to reclaim America's place as a dominant manufacturing power.

In the postwar heyday of American manufacturing, which endured into the 1970s, nearly 20 million people once made their living in manufacturing. The United States was a leading producer of motor vehicles, aircraft and steel. Manufacturing accounted for more than a quarter of total employment.

By the end of last year, after a fundamental restructuring of the world economy, manufacturing employed about 8% of the nation's workers.

Now, the country is wealthier than ever. Yet the economy looks, and feels, quite different — dominated by service work of all types, but in lucrative, low wage industrial hubs in the America can inter face often shifting, leaving many strongholds of Trump's base on the economic fringes.

Protectionist industrial policies, of varying institutional attitudes, have been on the rise for a decade — from the time Trump began his first campaign for president in 2015 through the presidency of Joe Biden and now with Trump in the Oval Office again.

But the president's announcement at a flag-draped Rose Garden ceremony on Wednesday represented a tectonic shift in US economic policy, the fullest repudiation of an embrace of global free trade that began on a bipartisan basis in the 1980s.

"With today's action we are finally going to be able to make America great again — greater than ever before," Trump said. "Jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country."

SOEPTICISM RUNS DEEP