Trump didn’t start this war

Donald Trump is a protectionist, virtually all agree, a menace to the international order whose America First stance threatens to launch trade wars and plunge the world into chaos. As decreed by pundits, economists and other experts throughout the world, a bizarro Trump inhabits “an alternate universe.”

In truth, it is these critics who inhabit an alternate universe. They need to open their eyes and see the world as it really is — dominated by protectionists.

Take automobiles, one of the world’s largest industries. American automakers selling into the European Union face a 10-per-cent tariff, four times that faced by European carmakers selling into the U.S. American carmakers selling into China face a 25-per-cent tariff. But these high tariff barriers are better, in a way, than the hurdles American automakers face when they sell into Japan, which has no tariff at all yet effectively shuts out U.S. exporters: Toyota sells more cars in a single California dealership than all U.S. automakers sell in Japan.

Instead of tariff barriers, the highly disciplined, uniquely structured Japanese economy employs non-tariff barriers — a host of formal regulations and informal understandings. Korea likewise employs non-tariff barriers, despite (or perhaps, because of) KORUS, the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement. As put last year by American Automotive Policy Council President Matt Blunt, “Clearly, KORUS has had mixed results for America’s automakers and it has failed to live up to expectations. There is no question the Korean marketplace is one of the most difficult for any automaker to export into in the world.” Each of the Big Three U.S. manufac- solemnly vowed to lower or eliminate tariffs, at home they silently replaced them with non-tariff barriers. “Both the OECD and the World Bank have been pointing to the rising impact of ‘non-tariff trade barriers’ on international trade,” notes David Hanson, associate professor of international business at Pittsburgh’s Duquesne University, in his book Limits to Free Trade: Non-Tariff Barriers in the European Union, Japan and United States.

When it comes to non-tariff barriers, the Japanese and