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Trump Administration’s steel tariffs, and the retaliatory tariffs levied by other nations in response, “have cost about 75,000 manufacturing jobs while creating only about 1,000 jobs in the steel industry.” Furthermore, he writes that “protectionism and similar progressive policies tend to weaken American security.” Lassman maintains that “trade creates peace,” and if China weren’t so reliant upon trade with the U.S., it would be “much more unstable and dangerous.” He thinks American influence in China—“Internet memes, fashion, movies”—can “play a vital role in helping to turn China from an authoritarian threat into a freer and less hostile power.”

Ultimately, Lassman believes that we should lower or repeal tariffs—including eliminating “the destructive Trump-Biden tariffs”—in order to make goods more affordable for Americans. He thinks free trade will improve our economy, enhance our national security, and keep future left-leaning Congresses from insisting that future left-leaning Presidents “negotiate for as many trade-unrelated provisions as possible to benefit labor and green constituencies.”

Navarro disagrees with Lassman almost across the board. He writes, “Trade policy can and must play an essential role in an American manufacturing and defense industrial base renaissance,” which he says is crucial to our country’s future. But two forces in particular “are pushing America in the opposite direction.” First, the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) “most favored nation” rules encourage our trade partners to adopt high tariffs, which lead to our “chronic” trade deficits and make us “the globe’s biggest trade loser and victim of unfair, unbalanced, and non-reciprocal trade.” For example, Navarro writes, tariffs on imported automobiles are 2.5 percent in the US., 10 percent in the European Union, and 15 percent in China. Second, China’s “economic aggression” in the form of “tariffs, nontariff barriers, dumping, counterfeiting and piracy, and currency manipulation” further weakens our “manufacturing and defense industrial base even as the fragility of globally dispersed supply chains has been brought into sharp relief by the COVID-19 pandemic.”

In contrast to Lassman, Navarro thinks that “trade deficits matter a great deal.” He writes that “offshoring not only suppresses the real wages of American blue-collar workers and denies millions of Americans the opportunity to climb up the rungs of the ladder to the middle class,” but it also “raises the specter of a manufacturing and defense industrial base that, unlike our experience in World Wars I and II, will not be able to provide the weapons and matériel that would be needed should America enter another major world war.” Also, China controls “much of the world’s pharmaceutical production and supply chains.” It is therefore essential, he writes, that our trade policy be guided by “the principle of reciprocity,” whereby we coax other countries into lowering their trade barriers if possible and raise ours as necessary. Moreover, he says we should “decouple” our economy from China’s.

China’s goal, Navarro says, is “to shift the world’s manufacturing and supply chains” to its soil, thereby strengthening its “defense industrial base and associated