Free trade gives us what we want: political independence and economic efficiency. We should work hard to try to keep it

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What’s our strategic objective in the current tariff war with the United States? Big picture, we want both political autonomy and economic integration. Our current problem is that the trade-off between the two is changing — unless we can out-wait Donald Trump. I argued yesterday we may be able to do that. If we can, what is our preferred outcome?

Along the crowded continuum of possible relationships, economists typically make six stops: political union, economic union, customs union, free trade area, go-it-alone and autarky.

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Dispense with the end points first. Autarky means everything you consume you produce yourself — localism gone wild, as it were, abandoning international economic specialization. At times Donald Trump seems to want this for the United States. Such a large, rich country might dream of achieving it. In 1947, imports were just 3.1........

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