Smoot-Hawley, Havana Charter, or McKinley Tariff?

Historical Analogy and the Future of U.S. Trade Policy

Speaker: Edward Knudsen, DAAD/AGI Research Fellow
Moderator: Peter Rashish, Vice President and Director of the Geoeconomics Program, AGI
Commentator: Beth Baltzan, Counselor for Trade and Investment, United States Trade Representative

References to the past are used to inform, legitimate, and contest U.S. trade policy decisions. Exploring economic attitudes in the 1945-2021 period reveals how policymakers have traditionally understood the legacy of interwar protectionism in the United States, especially the infamous 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff. Combining archival research with expert interviews, this session will provide insight into how and why we “remember” certain events and not others—as well as what effect this has had on policymaking. To examine the relationship between political change and memories of economic history, firsthand experience from the Biden administration will help to explain how the legacies of the Havana Charter and International Trade Organization inform the administration’s idea of a “worker-centered trade policy.” To conclude, this dialogue will examine the historical precedents for Donald Trump’s proposed trade policies and assess whether and how such analogies are useful.

Edward Knudsen is a doctoral researcher in international relations at the University of Oxford, a DAAD/AGI Research Fellow at the American-German Institute, and an Affiliate Policy Fellow at the Jacques Delors Centre in Berlin. His research focuses on the political economy and economic history of the United States and Europe in the twentieth century, specifically international sanctions, organized labor, and the role of memory in international economic policy. Previously, he worked for the U.S. and the Americas Programme at Chatham House in London. He holds a Master’s in International Political Economy from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a Bachelor’s degree with majors in History and Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has also previously worked for Chatham House, the Centre for International Security in Berlin, and advised the S&D Group in the European Parliament.

Beth Baltzan serves as Counselor for Trade and Investment. Ms. Baltzan previously served as an attorney at USTR from 2003 to 2009. In 2009, Ms. Baltzan joined the Office of International Affairs at the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, working on oversight in the wake of the financial crisis. In 2012, the PCAOB detailed Ms. Baltzan to the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, where she investigated banking practices. Ms. Baltzan then served as Democratic Trade Counsel for the House Ways and Means Committee from 2012 to 2016. After returning to USTR to work on litigation matters, in 2017 Ms. Baltzan formed her own trade consultancy practice. She was also a fellow at the Open Markets Institute. Ms. Baltzan received her J.D. from the Georgetown University Law Center. She received her Bachelor of Arts in International Relations, with honors, from Stanford University.

This event is supported by the DAAD with funds from the Federal Foreign Office.