How This Trade War Is Different From All Other Trade Wars

• April 11, 2025Updated 9:18 a.m. ET

If the on-again, off-again tariff announcements by President Trump have struck you as unusual, that’s for good reason. Nothing like this has ever happened before.

That’s the estimation of Douglas Irwin, a Dartmouth economic historian whose 2017 book, “Clashing Over Commerce: A History of US Trade Policy,” is the leading work on the subject. I called him for perspective. He told me that what we were experiencing was way outside the historical norm. One man alone has risked the first global trade war since the 1930s by raising tariffs to levels unseen for more than a century. The president’s actions, he said, represent a “big break with history.”

Even if Mr. Trump removes the tariffs — he announced a 90-day pause for some of the highest ones on Wednesday, while keeping a 10 percent base line for virtually all imports from around the world — his go-it-alone stance is a major departure. However the trade saga develops from here, the first skirmishes in a trade war, a dreaded relic of the Great Depression, have begun in the 21st century.

The consequences are still unfurling, but the stakes are high. They include the possibility of a global recession and geopolitical shifts that may not be in the interests of the United States — all occurring because of the swiftly shifting decisions by the president of the United States.

Until now, it had always taken decades of consensus building to bend the trajectory of trade policy, Professor Irwin said. When the country changed course in earlier times, Congress played the dominant role. Even when it began delegating authority to negotiate trade deals to the president in the 1930s, Congress set the direction of U.S. tariffs: downward.

Now, it’s unquestionably the president who has taken the United States on a new and hazardous path. “This is of historical significance,” Professor Irwin said.