The New Protectionism: U.S. Trade Policy in Historical Perspective

Until quite recently, cheerful accounts charting the postwar liberalization of American international trade policy were convincing. It was correct to stress the historic shift toward free trade that began with the series of bilateral accords reached under the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934 (RTAA), accelerated with instatement of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1947 and the Kennedy Round of tariff reductions in the 1960s, and seemed to progress more or less consistently thereafter. But upbeat descriptions appear increasingly inappropriate today, considering the extent to which new trade regulations -orderly marketing agreements (OMAs), voluntary export restraints (VERs), selective procurement, product standards, and buy-American requirements, to name a few have replaced the old tariffs. For the most part, since the disastrous Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930, Congress has stopped short of enacting patently protectionist statutes. But a welter of restrictive devices has accumulated nonetheless, through a political process more circuitous than in the past. The scope of today's defenses against imports is narrower than the all-embracing tariff in effect a half-century ago. Nevertheless, by 1983 they covered nearly onethird of the U.S. market in manufactured goods at an estimated cost of about $70 billion to American consumers.' And the coverage and cost threaten to in-