For much of American history, trade policy has meant protection of domestic resources and fledgling industries through tariffs and controls on importation. In the postwar period, however, a stronger America has lowered its own trade barriers substantially while using trade as a carrot and stick, reducing barriers globally in order to open markets internationally to US goods, agricultural, industrial and intellectual, and to affirm special relationships (“most favored nation status”). Economists, on the whole, tend to favor free trade, foreseeing greater efficiency and long-run benefits.

Global trade increased more than fourteen-fold from 1950 to 1998, contributing to improved standards of living/consumption for many in the US and abroad. This growth also has resulted in a large persistent American trade deficit since the 1970s and diverse reactions from the American people to arrangements made by both the government and multinational negotiators under the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, first signed in 1947) and the WTO (World Trade Organization) that has replaced it since 1994/5.

America’s undamaged industrial and agricultural infrastructure allowed it to capture a preeminent place in global marketing in the postwar period, which was eventually undercut by its own development practices and investments that created cheaper, more efficient manufacturing abroad. Hence, former enemies Japan and Germany have become major sources of the trade deficit along with neighbors Mexico and Canada (under NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement) and new Asian industrial nations.

By contrast, the US ran a surplus with Europe until 1991, and maintains this relationship with Britain and the Netherlands. Trade balances may be affected by limits and subsidies (in the case of the European Union and Japan) or by weaknesses in local currency and markets that undercut buying power (Canada, Mexico, Asia). Trade wars may be raged through such apparently unlikely products as bananas (with Europe) or film (with Japan).

Relations with China have created especially thorny issues.

Such imbalances in manufacture and trade cost jobs in the United States, even when they involve offshore investments of American corporations and miultinationals, leading unions to charge that profits and consumption are being traded for workers’ lives. Issues of environmental conditions of the non-US workplace, child labor, respect for intellectual property, morality and political regimes and related topics have also been brought by critics to debates over trade as moral policy.

Many of these issues were galvanized in the debate surrounding NAFTA (1994), which 1992 third-party candidate Ross Perot characterized by a “giant sucking sound” of jobs going to Mexico, but which nonetheless gained approval with solid bipartisan presidential and congressional support. To some extent, NAFTA built on years of special relations among the three North American states, including many measures for development of the Mexican American borderlands. Critics both before and after passage have challenged its impact on employment and wages, both in the US and an increasingly polarized Mexico, as well as failures to protect the environment and human rights equally under the agreement.

Frustration with the impacts of such agreement spilled out into days of civil action at the WTO meetings in Seattle, WA in 1999. Unions, environmentalists, anarchists and other citizens from the US and abroad joined in to protest both policies and domination of trade by this international group. Thus, trade became a popular as well as political issue in a new way for the nation and the world.