This article is taken from the June 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
We need to talk about “the most beautiful word in the dictionary”. I refer not to tariffs — but to trade. Like it or not, the American President has made a powerful case for the morally improving effect of barriers to the free movement of goods.
Tariffs will cleanse a decadent America that has forgotten the plain virtues of manufacturing — or so Donald Trump believes. It is now time for free traders to find similarly resonant arguments before it is too late.
I like globalisation. It has both lifted billions out of poverty and helped me pay for three sets of school fees and half a lifetime of high-altitude skiing holidays. But I fear its most vocal champions are caught in a trap not unlike the one faced by the Remainers in the run-up to the Brexit referendum.
Unable to conjure a convincing vision of the benefits of European collaboration, the remain campaign resorted instead to “Project Fear”, corralling big business to warn of disastrous economic consequences. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Something similar is happening now. JPMorganChase’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, told shareholders that tariffs increased the risk of an economic downturn and would “likely increase inflation”. US Chamber of Commerce CEO Suzanne Clark warned: “Many small businesses will suffer irreparable harm.” Ray Dalio, founder of the hedge-fund giant, Bridgewater Associates, said he was “worried about something worse than a recession”.
These gloomy forecasts may well turn out to be correct. But what each fails to do is articulate a positive vision of a world of free trade. This is unsurprising since, over the past few decades, across the Western world the very idea of trade has been coming under systematic assault.
In history, bestsellers like Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireland have reduced the extraordinary commercial achievements of Pax Britannica to an orgy of drug dealing, human trafficking and looting. Such tomes overlook the world’s multitudes who enjoyed the affordable delights created in British factories — elegant tea sets from The Potteries, fashionable brogues from Northampton or refreshing India pale ales from Burton-on-Trent.
Similarly, those who are now most outspoken about Trump’s tariffs were the same folk who harumphed about the “food miles” travelled by Kenyan asparagus or Sumatran tiger prawns. “Why can’t we just celebrate seasonal produce?” friends would breezily opine, having erased the memory of the endless tubers and cabbage we suffered together during the winter months at boarding school.
Instead, we should celebrate the fact that even the humblest of M&S food halls is now a cornucopia of exotic aromas and colours that not even the bazaars of Abbasid Baghdad could have rivalled.
It is time to make a bolder defence of free trade that champions its benefits
We have got to a point where even the language of trade has become soiled. The word “trader” conjures either a banker playing socially useless games in the towers of Canary Wharf or a street hawker flogging stolen phones across the river in Deptford. Meanwhile, “merchant” is most commonly used with the suffix “ … of death” to describe Le Carre villains selling Bazookas to African warlords.
In this negative climate, it is understandable that those fearful of Trump’s tariffs have chosen to stay in their lanes — sticking to analytical arguments about basis points of inflation or negative growth. But it is time to make a bolder defence of free trade that champions its economic, ethical and cultural benefits.
The advantages of open trade with an Asian superpower were eloquently described by William Dalrymple in his recent book The Golden Road. This tells the story of how Indian traders exported not just spices and handicrafts but also the great peaceable religion of Buddhism and the number zero — a concept which has enabled human achievements from double-entry bookkeeping to silicon chips.
The great trade fairs of Dubai and Hong Kong are the direct heirs to those buzzing entrepôts founded by the merchants who sailed the oceans a millennium ago.
Visit an expo in one of those city states for even the most prosaic of industries and one is struck not just by the variety of products, but also by the variety of ideas. Any one of these factory owners from Shenzhen or Hyderabad could be the next George Stephenson or Alexander Graham Bell. It is in these giant air-conditioned hangars that the world’s big problems will be solved — one store-keeper unit at a time.
Global ageing? We have a chatbot to keep grandma company. Environmental despoliation? Hey, check out our biodegradable cigarette filter. Energy security? Try this household battery you can fit in the garage. Look hard enough, and somewhere there might even be a solution for Donald Trump.
