The Architect of Trump’s Tariff Plan on Correcting the “Broken” Global Order

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: Meantime, $166 billion, that is the sum the Trump administration has been ordered to refund the U.S. companies that pay tariffs two months after the Supreme Court struck down Donald Trump’s import taxes. As of Monday, certain businesses can apply for these reimbursements through an online portal. Former U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer defends the president’s tariff regime, arguing that the free trade system has failed the global economy. And he joins Walter Isaacson to discuss.

 

WALTER ISAACSON: Thank you, Bianna. And Ambassador Robert Lighthizer, welcome back to the show.

 

ROBERT LIGHTHIZER: Thank you for having me. Walter.

 

ISAACSON: You have a pretty powerful piece in Foreign Affairs now that attacks the free trade system — you almost call it a free trade orthodoxy — that for 80 years grew after World War II. But it seems to me that that free trade system increased global wealth, made, brought people out of poverty, even helped the United States dollar stay in the lead. Tell me what was wrong with that free trade order?

 

LIGHTHIZER: So first of all, Walter, I would suggest that after World War II and for a period of decades the, what we would call sort of the current trade regime had a variety of successes. It did help, as you suggest, in the Cold War. It did raise countries some com, you know, some countries, citizens out of poverty. But over a period of time it’s sort of evolved into something quite different. The notion of the trading system was that a country exports in order to import. And when you do that, you import what you, what you make sort of second best and export what you make best. And when you do that, you make your citizens better off and you make the other citizens of the country that’s exporting to you better off.

 

But over a period of time, an awful lot of countries concluded that they were a lot better off running up large trade surpluses. And we developed these huge imbalances. And they really had very little to do with economics. What they had to do with was a very aggressive industrial policies. And we saw a variety of countries do this. So the system, the system did do well. After a period of time, certainly by the eighties, countries were realizing — and in the case of Japan, probably even in the late sixties — that they were far better off with a very aggressive industrial policy, rather than this notion of exporting in order to import. 

 

So you ended up a huge imbalances. And in the case of the United States, let me just go through the indictment very quickly. First of all, we’re running up these huge, huge trade deficits. Oh, I would say the realistic number is sort of north of $1.2 trillion a year for the United States. And some would say, well, who cares? You know, my reaction is, it doesn’t matter if you don’t care who owns America. So what’s really going on at the macro level is we are transferring our wealth overseas in return for current consumption because other countries have kind of rigged industrial policy. So what’s the cumulation of that? If you look at the net investment position of the United States — which is how much Americans own overseas versus how much everyone else owns in America — that number, which when I was in the Reagan administration, was a substantial positive number, several hundred billion dollars, is now a negative $27 trillion. 

 

ISAACSON: Well wait a minute real quick. Why is it so bad if other countries invest in our equity, debt and real estate?

 

LIGHTHIZER: It’s not a question of investing. You’re, see, your sort of view is that it doesn’t matter who owns America. There was a great article that Warren Buffett has, it is called Squanderville and Thriftville. And he likens this to a farmer who sells acreage every year in order to consume. He will live quite nicely until he doesn’t have any more land. And then he can either consume nor make any money from his land. You can’t, you can’t transfer your wealth overseas. 

 

And to remind you, this is not because other countries are more efficient or do things better than us. This is because they have an industrial policy. Now, let’s just think, what’s the industrial policy? It’s currency manipulation. It’s a tax policy designed to take resources from their consumers and give ’em to their producers in order to create this huge imbalance. It’s a banking system. It’s labor laws, it’s health and safety regulations which are designed not because of science to help health and safety, but to reduce imports into their country. It’s massive, massive, massive subsidies. And if you let them do this, these imbalances will accumulate, accumulate, accumulate. And the United States, as a result of it, is a poorer country by $27 trillion than it otherwise would’ve been. 

 

ISAACSON: Well, let me cut right to the chase. It seems that the bad thing that really happened, was it hollowed out the American working class? Is that true?

 

LIGHTHIZER: Well, I would say the, I would say the bad things are the following. One, this massive transfer of wealth overseas. So the United States, and as I say, our children are poor as a result of it. The second thing is we’ve seen a substantial slowdown in what you would think of as sort of traditional economic growth in the United States. So much slower economic growth. I give you a couple of data points on that. If you look at from the war, which you, which you know — which you identified as a data point — to 2000, the United States grew on average about 3.1 percent of GDP a year. When you move to the last 25 years, that is to say after this period of you would say, hyperglobalization, which includes the worst single thing was of course granting most favored nation permanently to China. But also NAFTA and creating the World Trade Organization. And we can delve into that if we have time. So if you look at from 2000, 2001 forward, instead of 3.1% GDP growth, we end up with 2.1 or or slightly over 2% of GDP growth. And if you think of periods of time, the United States, in most 20 year periods before 2000 grew at over 3%, about 14 years out of 20. We’ve seen basically a flat line from China entering the WTO for 15 years. We saw a flat line in medium family income. 

 

And then we’ve seen the hollowing out of these cities that we see across the Midwest. And all the very bad consequences of that, including I would say, very bad health consequences. Where a lot of our working class people have really lost many years of their lives. You know, there was a famous book called Deaths of Despair, which pointed out that people that don’t have a college degree — which is like a proxy for these working class people — on average live about eight years shorter lives. And what do they die from? They die from suicide, alcohol drugs, basically what Anne Case and Angus Eaton call deaths of despair. So we’ve seen very bad societal impacts, slower economic growth in a transfer of wealth overseas. And I say none of it is because of basic economics. It’s all because someone else, in this case, primarily China, but a lot of other people have very aggressive economic policies. They’re designed, really, to take advantage of the fact that the United States has a relatively open capital market and a relatively open economic system. 

 

ISAACSON: The system you propose is actually to say, alright, if there are major imbalances between — over a course of, say, three or four years between the United States and another country — we’ve gotta stop that. We gotta put some tariffs on, or we gotta make sure they get their trade back into balance. Could you do that amongst all democratic nations and try to have a new world trade order based on balances?

 

LIGHTHIZER: Yes. Now that’s, that Walter is precisely what I’m proposing. When President Trump came to office, he was faced with two gigantic problems in this sphere and other problems obviously out of it. One were these massive trade imbalances that were having these negative effects on our economy, but primarily on our workers. We also have this geopolitical relationship with China that had to be dealt with. And it had become China has become more aggressive economically, but also more aggressive militarily and diplomatically. So we had these two things to deal with, and he, and I think he dealt with ’em appropriately using tariffs. You could criticize this or that detail, but the diagnosis and the direction and the tool, in my opinion were correct. 

 

So, then the question is, where do we go from here, right? You solve the problem. I think we need a new global order. We need a new organization that people can have confidence in, and that has predictability. And what I am proposing is one among democracies — reasonably open market countries. And what I’m really saying is if they commit to balance, over some period of time — globally, not bilaterally — that that we will have this kind of prediction predictability, and we will have more growth and better outcomes, not only for American working people, but for the working people around the world. Because by putting in place tariffs or some other kind of corrective measure, you’re really helping the proper allocation of resources around the world. You’re not really detracting from it because you’re going to get back to this notion of a, of a system that doesn’t have these gigantic imbalances.

 

ISAACSON: You talk about the inequalities too, and the enriching of the elites, I think you sometimes call it in your paper. Is that something that was structurally part of this trade system? And how could we get it so that the rewards for the working class, for labor, could be better off in the system you propose?

 

LIGHTHIZER: Well, I’m hoping that’s what happened. So you ask yourself, you know, what really has happened? If you look at the United States for the first time in our history, the top 1% has more wealth than the middle 60%. If you ask yourself, take the top 1% person and compare him to the middle person. When I was a kid, and when you were a kid that was about 36 times richer. Now it’s 72 times richer. So we’re moving in a very bad — now, some liberals might say the way to approach that is to tax very heavily the rich people and give the money to the middle class. That I think is not a good outcome because I believe in the dignity of work. I believe that people feel better when they have productive, good jobs. So what I’m suggesting is that we have a system that’s designed to create these high paying jobs.

 

And if we get that trade deficit down from 1.2 — and I would say it’s probably, if you act properly calculated even higher than that — trillion dollars, you’re gonna create an enormous number of these jobs. We need more workers in the 100,000, 90-100,000 dollars range. 

 

ISAACSON: And you talk about bringing back the good jobs, and mainly I think in manufacturing, you mentioned in the piece. Because if we have better trade balances, maybe we’d manufacture more here. But are there like 400,000 or so manufacturing jobs going begging in the United States? What’s the imbalance there?

 

LIGHTHIZER: So, for sure, and I think to some extent that is evidence that the Trump program is working. This is gonna take time. Reindustrialization is gonna take time. And training, getting workers from, you know, from not working or from low-paying jobs to high-paying manufacturing jobs. It’s gonna take training. It’s gonna take time, it’s gonna take diligence, but it is in the process of working. 

 

We have lots, lots, millions of Americans out there, who are either unemployed, partially employed, looking for full-time work, or totally out of the workforce. We have it. If you add all that up, who knows what the number is. But you could easily get to 20 million Americans who need these kinds of jobs. And nobody thinks this is gonna happen in five minutes or five days or even a year. This is a long-term process. But we, as you suggest, we seem to be moving in the right direction. There’s a lot of what I call green shoots that suggest that manufacturing is taking off. 

 

ISAACSON: You talk about how it seems to be working, the directional way that President Trump has done with the tariffs, yet the U.S. goods trade deficit in 2025 was at a record high. Explain that to me.

 

LIGHTHIZER: Well, part of what happened was people trying to rush things in ahead of tariffs, right? And it’s sort of an implementation problem. Another thing that happened, Walter, is you saw a lot of computers and things coming in because of these data centers that are being built in this massive way. So we saw a certain amount of goods coming in and that. So you say to yourself, you know, the critics of the president will say, My goodness, we haven’t re-industrialized. No one would criticize the CHIPS Act a year after it was implemented in 2022 and say, we haven’t re industrialized. 

 

But — so what are the green shoots? You see this purchasing managers index is now positive. We see the Fed’s production numbers are now showing substantial improvements. We have seen a substantial improvement in productivity, which is really, really important in the manufacturing sector. We’ve seen factory startup up, we’ve seen capital investment up substantially. So there are a lot of things to indicate this is happening. But, as you and I both know, this is a multi-year process and, you know, we have to have, you know, we have to start every day trying to get it to, to, you know, to work for that day. And over a period of hopefully two or three years, we’ll see these jobs. We will, we’ll, you know, we’ll return. And we’ll see the direction changed dramatically.

 

ISAACSON: You also predicted last time that prices would come down and you said it’d be pretty soon. Well, obviously that hasn’t happened with inflation really ticking up. Is that something that’s gonna take a much longer time too?

 

LIGHTHIZER: So let’s talk about that. When the tariffs were in place, you and I spoke and what economists and critics from some, you know, significant business newspaper said is we were gonna have a depression and double digit inflation, right? So let’s put ourself in context. You know, their predictions were actually, looking back, farcical and funny, you know, they’re so ridiculous. So, then you say, what really is happening right now? We are seeing a bump in inflation. Inflation is a systemic thing. Clearly the impact of energy costs because of the war on Iran, it’s gonna have an impact. I would suggest if you go before that core inflation, that is to say inflation that does not include energy was actually in a pretty good range. It was about a little over 2%. The notion that tariffs somehow create inflation is, I would, is I think really quite wrong. You’ve seen a study by the San Francisco Fed that suggested that it’s not true. You’ve seen the fact that we put tariffs in place and we did not have inflation in the first term. You can see that China has more barriers to trade than any country in the world, and it actually has deflation, not inflation. So I don’t really think it’s fair to make that kind of link. Right now, are we seeing inflation closer to 3% overall than we really want? Which is closer to, which is closer to 2%, yes. But there’s a lot of things going on, and if you look at where that inflation is, it is almost not at all in tariffed items, right? It is in services primarily healthcare and financial services. So, and these are things that don’t have any tariffs associated with ’em at all. 

 

So I, I don’t see anything in the current data that suggests that the president’s program is not working. I think I see a lot in the data that suggests that the predictions of all the geniuses — by the way, the same geniuses who prescribed an economic program that ended up getting us into this position where we have all these really bad results for our working class people. I don’t see anything that supports their position. And where we are is we have to stick to it. I would say stick to the program. We have to work our way through this Iran situation, get oil production back up, oil prices back down, and then I think you’re gonna see a lot of the results, the long-term results of manufacturing and the return of these kinds of jobs, which build up our communities and our families.

 

ISAACSON: Ambassador Robert Lighthizer, thank you for joining us again.

 

LIGHTHIZER: Walter, always great to be with you. Thank you.