questions, questions, questions

elected officials serve their voters, not necessarily ours

Cast your mind back to the morning of 12 September 2001 as we were in utter paralysis. We tried to understand what happened the prior morning in New York, at the Pentagon, and in a field in southwest Pennsylvania. We worried about assuring our children’s safety. We were in mourning over lives lost as rescuers dug through the remnants of burning buildings for survivors.

We awoke on that September Wednesday to a world of profound uncertainty. Yet, we could trust our allies to stand behind us. Indeed, those allies sent men and women overseas to “protect our back” over the years in Afghanistan.

3 April 2025 dawned with a similar experience for our allies. We cultivated or inspired these nations to adopt the philosophy of global governance, participatory governance, and free trade. Following our leadership in World War II and the Cold War, the world these nations embraced allowed these countries to rebuild their societies (in Asia or Europe) over the past eighty years. There have been ups and downs for some sectors and countries, but the march towards greater overall prosperity has been astonishing.

All of that imploded with the enunciation of open-ended U.S. tariffs which go into effect tomorrow. We had been the central feature of the global free trade system because we benefitted from the system they wove together. These new tariffs undermine the configuration of relationships built over decades. The mutuality, the trust, and the rules that rebuilt nations destroyed in two global wars within thirty years no longer stand as a measure of a shared aspiration for the future of growth for all.

The shocks yesterday globally were equivalent to September twenty-four years ago.

Our allies no longer have the security of believing our commitments. We committed to free trade as a substitute for pursuing conflict, only to preference trade imbalances (apparently) over negotiated commitments to international agreements as the path for the future. Negotiations rely on trust, but that trust disintegrated overnight. The aspired re-shoring of manufacturing jobs to the United States could take years to materialize.

We have never entirely returned to a pre-9/11 sense of security, but we had allies in Europe and Northeast Asia, participatory democracies, who supported us. Why would they be there, we asked in the future?

Our adversaries will suffer from our tariffs, of course, but how much? The imposition of these tariffs will make their products more expensive for U.S. consumers, but how and why will they affect the behavior of other governments? Doesn’t it make sense that the effects on them will be fewer than those in the countries with whom we are simpático?

Trade is only a portion of national security, of course, which returns us to the nature of our alliances now in tatters. The same week the tariff announcement emerged Secretary of State Rubio urged NATO members to increase their defense expenditures to 5% of gdp. The United States spends roughly 3.5%, by the way. How will these two actions affect the future for national security?

U.S. taxpayers, particularly if they expected costs and taxes to decline, will be paying considerably more, at least in the short term, for many products since our globalized world means so much we consume daily comes from abroad. Free trade encouraged companies to move production to the cheapest labor markets to capitalize on comparative advantage of other countries. Tariffs will mean we pay more as that re-shoring, if it occurs, will take years to accomplish. Many taxpayers will also find that defense spending will increase rather than decline as the America First Agenda includes implications likely under-appreciated in during the electoral campaign.

Life and national security involve trade-offs, both immediate and long-term. I rise on 4 April 2025, confident that we see a long-term change ahead, but not where our voice is as powerful as before. Perhaps that is good, but I suspect we will look back on this as a turning point in so many ways.

I welcome your thoughts about tariffs, alliances, adversaries, and other aspects of this week’s monumental decisions. We are entering a world none has lived through, so conversation is vital to prevent us from becoming self-contained capsules.

Thank you for taking time to read Actions today. I appreciate each of you, especially if you put financial support behind this column. An annual subscription is $55 (just a dollar a week) or $8 monthly.

A tulip fading past its prime but still lovely to view.

Be well and be safe. FIN

Laurence Norman and Michael Gordon, “Rubio Pushes for Higher Defense Spending at NATO but Says It will Take Time“, WSJ.com, 4 April 2025, retrieved at https://www.wsj.com/world/rubio-pushes-for-higher-spending-at-nato-but-says-it-will-take-time-891f0224?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=1