Economists from across the political spectrum have long agreed on one area of policy: the removal of barriers to international trade. This consensus has guided the global embrace of trade liberalization between World War II and the present, coinciding with historically unprecedented levels of economic growth. In recent years, free trade has gained numerous detractors who denounce the post‐war period as an aberration from an alternative American economic history. From Pat Buchanan in the early 1990s to former U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer today, the United States became an economic powerhouse by strategically cultivating an industrial base through a system of protectionist tariffs, infrastructure improvements, and subsidies—the American System of the 19th century developed by politician Henry Clay. Proponents of this view often depict free trade as a foreign doctrine originating in Britain and present themselves as revivalists of a lost historical record in which the
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