Throughout US history, trade has been politically contentious. It engenders controversy because trade has distributive consequences. Trade generates economic gains for some, but losses for others. And who the winners and losers are within a given country shifts over time.

Policymakers anticipated the political backlash trade could provoke and constructed institutions to manage it. In 1962, Congress established Trade Adjustment Assistance, a programme designed specifically to compensate workers displaced by import competition. Its creation reflected an early recognition by policymakers that trade generates losers as well as winners, and that those losers can be politically consequential.

Trade policy has become entangled with questions of national security, supply chain resilience, and strategic competition. Where the case for restricting imports once rested on the economic hardship faced by particular workers and firms, it can now be made in terms of reducing dependence on a geopolitical rival for goods deemed essential to national resilience, such as semiconductors.

This development gives added weight to demands for protection. Protectionist policies that might once have been dismissed as narrow special-interest lobbying now command support across a much wider swath of the political spectrum. National security concerns provide a justification for protection that appeals to voters and legislators who are indifferent to the fate of any particular industry but responsive to arguments about strategic vulnerability. Protection, often in the form of tariffs, may now unite economic nationalists on the right with China hawks in both parties and labour-aligned Democrats. As a result, American trade protectionism may be here to stay.

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