ABSTRACT
In his 1988 State of the Union address, American President Ronald Reagan declared that: “We should always remember: Protectionism is destructionism. America’s jobs, America’s growth, America’s future depend on trade—trade that is free, open, and fair”. American presidents after Reagan have generally embraced free trade in their foreign policies. Yet, for most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the US was described by Paul Bairoch (1993) to be “the mother country and bastion of modern protectionism” (p. 30). Distance from Europe and Asia, together with its sizeable domestic market, contributed to this state of affairs. Trade policy demands from different sectors of the US economy were mixed. On the one hand, industrialists in the northeast of the country desired protection for their manufactured products. On the other hand, farmers in the south, faced with a global over-supply, experienced declining prices for their exports and were against protectionism. The industrialists won and the US implemented the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act in 1930 that saw an unprecedented level of restrictions on imports from both the agricultural and manufacturing sectors. In turn, some twenty-five countries retaliated against the US by raising their own trade barriers, and international trade collapsed, deepening the Great Depression.
