Seven years ago, I strode through the long black-and-white corridors of the White House’s Executive Office of the President to a room occupied by Peter Navarro, adviser to the then president Donald Trump.
Navarro’s desk was buried beneath piles of paper. “I’m always messy,” the economist laughed, and presented a 140-page report with an American flag on the cover titled “Assessing and Strengthening the Manufacturing and Defense Industrial Base and Supply Chain Resiliency of the United States”. This asserted that the US had become dangerously reliant on overseas suppliers for vital goods and thus needed industrial policies and trade controls.
“That’s a bit retro,” I joked. The last time such language had proliferated was during and after the second world war, when the American government tried to shape business to national ends. In peacetime, arguably the only comparable moment was the explosion of protectionism around the world that followed the Wall Street crash of 1929.