Echoes of Reagan in Trump’s Clashes With Allies: New at Reason

The French foreign minister accuses the American president of furthering a “divorce” between the United States and its European allies.

“Deep Trade Rift With Allies Seen,” is a headline at The New York Times. “The Roots of Western Disunity” is the headline over another Times piece observing, “Over the last few years, trans-Atlantic differences on foreign policy have become so frequent that most of us regard them as the normal state of affairs.”

“Rising Trade Barriers Stir Memories of U.S. Depression,” is another Times headline, over an article that begins, “A surge of aggressive economic nationalism, as strong as any in the last half century, threatens to overwhelm the free trade policies that have underwritten the postwar prosperity of industrialized nations.” It quotes a House staffer who called the situation “the most dangerous since 1930,” which the Times reminded readers referred to “the Smoot-Hawley tariffs, which some say triggered the Great Depression.”

The Times also writes about the president’s “killing off of top foreign-policy officials,” noting that so far the president “has had three national security advisers and two Secretaries of State.”

That may all sound like it is recent press coverage of the Trump administration. Actually, though, it was all coverage of President Ronald Reagan, from back in 1982 and 1983, writes Ira Stoll.

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