Keynes and Kennan retain their relevance even today

Their clarity on the virtues of globalization could serve us well amid Trump's tariff onslaught

- RAHUL JACOB

At an event to celebrate George Kennan in 1994 on the eve of his 90th birthday, the diplomat credited with the strategy of containment that guided US policy towards the former Soviet Union said it had resulted in "one of the great disappointments of my life." Kennan was saddened that containment had extracted costs too high and that the US and its European allies had in effect demanded the Soviet Union's "unconditional surrender."

In 1914, John Maynard Keynes wrote an almost triumphalist ode to globalization, just before that vision was dismantled by World War I and the subsequent Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in the US. Re-reading Keynes, it is hard not to think of Amazon, which serves a much wider swathe of the global middle class than the elite he was referring to when he wrote that "the inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep."

Both men were profound globalists, whose thoughts were the very antithesis of the Trumpian vision of trade and geopolitics as a zero-sum game. The unilateral tariffs announced last week, the nonsensical formula for tariff rates—derided for plausibly having been thought up by ChatGPT—and the accompanying rhetoric of retribution from the White House would have been sacrilege to Kennan and Keynes.