Column Archive

Today is Election Day in the United States, when Americans will render their verdict on the presidency of Donald Trump. When Ronald Reagan was running for president in 1980, he famously asked voters to consider whether they were better off than they had been four years earlier, when his opponent, Jimmy Carter, took office. It appears from polls that many Americans will base their vote on Trump’s disastrous handling of the coronavirus pandemic. But changes to trade policy were a central part of Trump’s campaign to “make America great again,” so it’s fair to ask what Trump has delivered. Last […]

As Americans cast their ballots Tuesday, and indeed for the millions who already have, they are voting for the future not just of their own country, but of the open world that the United States helped create. A distinctive element of this global order, particularly since the fall of the Berlin Wall, has been the removal of many restrictions on cross-border flows of goods, money, ideas and even people. Under every American president since the Cold War, until Donald Trump, the United States championed global integration as a motor of prosperity, a bulwark of peace and—at least implicitly—a source of […]