Donald Trump's Gift to Globalization

Not since the crash of 2008 has free trade held the moral and intellectual high ground.

- Janan Ganesh

The plaque that honours David Ricardo in Bloomsbury seems almost designed to be walked past unnoticed. The nearby statue of his fellow free-trader Richard Cobden has become a popular latrine with the local bird population. And so a visual metaphor – about the soiled, neglected idea of trade – would have begun this column a few weeks ago.

Now? The Ricardian cause has no lack of friends. These include: financial markets, which have judged that US President Donald Trump's tariffs will destroy wealth, or stop it being created; the Chinese embassy in Washington, which quotes Ronald Reagan's case against protectionism back at his party; and, most tellingly, the left, which has chosen not to defend the tariffs as a reassertion of the state. In taking such a welcome stand on this issue, progressives may not realise quite how much is being admitted – the sanctity of price competition, for instance – but let's not scare them off.

For the first time since the crash of 2008, globalization has the high ground. It is those striving to undo it who are on the moral and intellectual defensive. Protectionism has turned out to be something of a fair-weather cause: popular as long as no one has to make a material sacrifice.

Granted, moral and intellectual victories are worth only so much if tariffs keep escalating in tit-for-tat reprisals between the US, China and the EU. Winning the argument is small consolation for losing the world. But real events tend to follow, after a lag, the tide of ideas. "Liberation Day" was the result of a decade or more in which free-traders lost all confidence.