The Canadians Are Right About Reagan and Free Trade

During the first game of this year’s World Series, the government of Ontario paid for an anti-tariff advertisement that used audio from a Ronald Reagan radio address. “America’s jobs and growth are at stake,” Reagan says, decrying protectionism and trade wars.

President Trump was incensed. He attacked the ad as “fake,” arguing that it falsely represented Reagan’s views on trade. He promptly cut off trade talks with Canada and said he would impose an additional 10 percent duty on Canadian products. If he follows through, the advertisement will be one of the most expensive in history.

The episode was not just another trade spat. It was also another attempt to rebrand Reagan’s record along Trumpian lines. Reagan remains an icon among many Republicans: He was elected by a large margin, won re-election by a landslide and left the presidency extremely popular with the American public. Mr. Trump, by contrast, narrowly won two elections and lost another, and his polling numbers are hovering in the low 40-percent range. Naturally, he’s sensitive about comparisons with his predecessor.

Mr. Trump’s supporters and allies seek to portray Reagan’s presidency as a precursor to an America First trade agenda. “Ronald Reagan loved tariffs,” Mr. Trump said. It’s true that Reagan negotiated limits on imported goods to protect domestic producers of cars and steel from foreign competition. But he would not have embraced Mr. Trump’s protectionist trade wars.

In countless speeches, radio addresses and policy actions, Reagan assailed the costs of protection and hailed the virtues of free trade. He concluded free-trade agreements with Israel and Canada; vetoed protectionist congressional legislation; denied import relief for the copper, steel and shoe industries; and helped launch the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade talks, which led to the creation of the World Trade Organization. As Mr. Trump has also said, Reagan was “very bad on trade.”

So what were Reagan’s views on trade policy? Reagan was not a doctrinaire policymaker. The key to understanding his approach is the three P’s: principle, pragmatism and politics.

On principle, there is no question as to where Reagan stood. In 1982 he said, “Free trade serves the cause of economic progress, and it serves the cause of world peace.” In 1985 he said that “our trade policy rests firmly on the foundation of free and open markets — free trade.”

He was equally firm in opposing protectionism. “We should call it destructionism,” he argued. “It destroys jobs, weakens our industries, harms exports, costs billions of dollars to consumers, and damages our overall economy.” He called demands for high tariffs and import restrictions “a familiar bit of flimflammery in American politics.”

But Reagan was pragmatic. While believing that trade should be free, it also had to be fair. He advocated enforcing trade agreements and addressing unfair trade practices. For example, in 1987 Reagan delivered a radio address, the one used in the Ontario ad, after having imposed tariffs on some imports from Japan — a step, he added, “that I am loath to take.” But this was “a special case” in which Japan violated an agreement on semiconductor trade, Reagan said, and he was “just trying to deal with a particular problem, not begin a trade war.”

Finally, Reagan was a politician. The Democrats in Congress were pressuring him to do more to limit imports in the face of a growing trade deficit. It was partly in reaction to this pressure that Reagan adopted import limits for certain industries. As William Niskanen, one of Reagan’s officials, put it, the administration’s strategy was “to build a five-foot trade wall in order to deter a 10-foot wall” that Congress would have built.

Might Reagan have approved some of Mr. Trump’s measures against China? Reagan always qualified his embrace of free trade by saying it applied to friends and free nations. Even though the United States did not trade extensively with the Soviet Union in the 1980s, there was no question of having export restrictions to prevent sophisticated technology from leaking to our adversary. He might well have been concerned about China’s mercantilism today.

Yet even with foreign rivals, Reagan was pragmatic. He disappointed conservatives by lifting the grain embargo that President Jimmy Carter had imposed after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. As the columnist George Will lamented at the time, the Reagan administration “loves commerce more than it loathes communism.”

The Ontario ad was right: Reagan would not have approved of Mr. Trump’s protectionist trade policies, particularly when aimed at allies. Reagan also predicted their adverse outcomes. In 1985, he said that “one of the first victims of a protectionist trade war will be America’s farmers, who have it tough enough already” — an accurate description of where we are today as soybean farmers suffer from the loss of foreign markets.

One Reagan rebuke, in a speech he gave in 1988, has resonance today. “Protectionism is being used by some American politicians as a cheap form of nationalism,” he warned. “We should beware of the demagogues who are ready to declare a trade war against our friends — weakening our economy, our national security and the entire free world — all while cynically waving the American flag.”

Douglas A. Irwin is an economics professor at Dartmouth College who worked on trade policy in the Reagan administration. He is the author of “Clashing Over Commerce: A History of US Trade Policy.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.