President Donald Trump’s tariffs and protectionism are hardly novel.

Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton restricted Japanese car imports, which motivated Toyota, Honda and Nissan to establish production here. President Joe Biden continued most of Trump’s tariffs and added others on electric vehicles and strategic products from China.

Those are just part of a growing arsenal of Economic Statecraft and go back to Alexander Hamilton’s tariffs to foster domestic industries and finance the federal government.

All contributed to a wider menu of economic incentives, regulations and coercion designed to build up the U.S. economy and accomplish security and foreign policy objectives.

Biden favored industrial policies—subsidies for semiconductor, EV, battery and green energy production—restrictions on foreign direct investment and export controls—for example on artificial intelligence chips.

He imposed sanctions to punish Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s human rights abuses in Xinjiang province, aggression in the South China Sea and Straits of Taiwan and predatory manufacturing subsidies.

Economic Statecraft can have merit.

Damaging Russia’s economy by limiting its oil export revenues is less dangerous than military intervention. Forcing China to develop indigenous semiconductor capabilities diverts resources that could be used for its naval buildup.

America is hardly alone as protagonist or victim of economic nationalism.

In the late 1960s, Airbus was established by France, Germany and the United Kingdom and has received generous subsidies. The United States had three major manufacturers of large commercial passenger aircraft—Boeing, McDonnell Douglas and Lockheed. Now we have but one.

Nowadays, unbridled allegiance to globalization is seen as naïve—proponents of the Washington Consensus favoring open international markets for goods and investment to boost national economies have been marginalized. The free trade candle is kept burning largely by mainstream economists and foreign policy specialists at universities and think tanks.

Multilateral and regional free trade agreements from Presidents Harry Truman to Barack Obama had the virtue of providing a yardstick to measure all domestic and foreign economic policies—do those encourage trade and investment premised on comparative advantages and promote economic efficiency?

Now, multifaceted objectives like quality jobs—union manufacturing jobs vs. public facing services employment—environmental sustainability, equity and inclusion and domestic resilience are the prisms. Those may permit more desired outcomes by balancing competing social objectives but are prone to abuse and harmful outcomes.

President Biden nixed Nippon Steel’s acquisition of US Steel, appeasing the United Steelworkers, even though Nippon offered new capital and technology to this valuable employer. Many rank and file steelworkers supported the deal.

The Biden Commerce Department awarded its largest semiconductor manufacturing grants to Intel but it’s losing market share thanks to poor strategic choices and slowing investments at its Oregon and Ohio fabs.

The CHIPS Act has inspired competing programs in Japan, Canada, the EU and elsewhere, but now Germany, Poland and Israel are suffering similar setbacks, indicating all these subsidies contributing to a global capacity glut.

Globalization is hardly dead.

China is aggressively investing in mineral resources in Africa, ports in South America and elsewhere, EV and battery factories in Europe and infrastructure, electronics and other manufacturing in ASEAN.

U.S. multinationals have about $7 trillion in FDI (foreign direct investment) abroad, and the economic output of their affiliates equals that of Brazil or Spain.

However, the imperative to diversify supply chains resulting from national rivalries requires multinationals to devote substantial resources to monitoring, lobbying and compliance that raise costs and prices and makes us poorer.

Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, whether they stick or prove just a lever to win concessions, are dangerous.

He may bully Denmark to obtain better access to Greenland’s minerals, military-strategic location and block China from a foothold in the Artic, but our larger trading partners can retaliate against tariffs more easily.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has argued tariffs won’t necessarily cause inflation because if we tax imports, households will reduce purchases of other products—presumably that drives down the latter’s prices. Apparently, taxing food, as Trump’s tariffs do, will lower the price of housing?

Perhaps he got that reasoning from Stephen Miran, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, who argues a country large enough to influence import prices by how much it purchases can make itself better off by applying what we call in international economic theory an optimal tariff. That only works if other nations don’t retaliate—if they do, all participants become worse off than before.

Other governments will retaliate, indicating Trump’s tariff strategy is naïve and also makes us poorer.

The first Trump administration argued tax cuts would pay for themselves. Then perhaps they can explain why from 2016 to 2019 the federal budget deficit jumped from 3.1% of GDP to 4.6%.

There’s lots of dangerous wishful thinking in the West Wing these days.

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Peter Morici is an economist and emeritus business professor at the University of Maryland, and a national columnist.