“We have a 20th century president in a 21st century economy who wants to take us back to the 19th century,“ Dartmouth College economics professor Douglas Irwin posted on X.
The century extended a doctrine adopted since the country's founding, which advocated for the protection of the American economy as it underwent a period of industrialization.
“But the two more important factors were access to international labor, and capital... which was flowing in the United States during that period,“ he added.
These resources included coal, oil, iron ore, copper and timber -- all of which were crucial to industry.
Shortly after taking office in January, Trump said: “We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913.”
These tariffs did not prevent imports from continuing to grow in the years that followed, although once customs duties were lowered in 1894, the amount of goods the US purchased abroad remained below previous peaks.
In 1929, Harvard professor George Roorbach wrote: “Since the end of the Civil War (1865), during which the United States has been under a protective system almost, if not quite, without interruption, our import trade has enormously expanded.”
A year later, the young nation tightened the screws with tariffs again, this time under Republican president Herbert Hoover.
“What generated the depression... was a lot of complicated factors, but the tariff increase is one of them,“ said Maskus from the University of Colorado.
The agreement created the conditions for the development of international trade by imposing more moderate customs duties.
Alongside NAFTA, free trade in the United States was further expanded by the creation of the World Trade Organization in 1995, and a 2004 free trade agreement between the United States and several Central American countries.
But despite these levies, the US trade deficit with China continued to grow until 2022, when China was hit by a brutal economic slowdown unrelated to the tariffs.
For Keith Maskus, the tariffs on Beijing did not do much to prevent the growth of imports from China.
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