US Trade Interests

United States Trade Interests

            The United States of America is a global empire of prosperity and diversity; its qualities and interests have shaped the world. America has had an everlasting goal of influencing other nations to adopt the same ideas and values that it holds so dear. The U.S. does this in many ways and one of those ways is to encourage a free market. America has weakened its domestic production in return for a stronger international trade system. This has hurt American employees but it has benefited the nation and the global system.

            After the Cold War, free market enterprises peaked. The American market was open for international trade. By opening the American market, other nations did the same by freely trading with the U.S. and other nations. This offered a lot of prosperity internationally and it also exposed the faults in a possible Soviet atmosphere (Eckes). The Soviet Union discouraged a free market because it wanted to monopolize all economic affairs (Rieger). When the United States capitalized on the free market to show other nations the benefits, support for the Soviet Union dwindled rapidly. The encouragement of a free market came at a price; “the U.S. government sacrificed thousands of domestic jobs to create employment and prosperity elsewhere in the noncommunist world” (Eckes). The idea of promoting American ideals significantly outweighed the importance of maintaining domestic jobs; this further proves that the goal of free trade was to promote American values.

            The promotion of American values such as the free market was not necessarily for the United States to dominate the world but to make a world similar to American society. Robert Baldwin explains this in his article: “U.S. Trade Policy: Recent Changes and Future U.S. Interests”. He writes that “by the late 1960s that the American economic position of the early postwar years had eroded to the point where the United States became one of a small group of countries whose individual actions significantly influenced, but did not dominate, the international economic order” (Baldwin).

            One could argue that the U.S. wanted to appear as the dominate force internationally through specific domestic export groups. America adopted trade policies to create a system where they would lose in the short term by demolishing domestic jobs but would benefit in the long run by spreading democracy across the world. Baldwin explains the motivations of the United States and the implications:

The expansionist efforts of the Soviet Union in Western Europe...led U.S. political leaders to accept fully the role and responsibilities of the hegemon in the free world. U.S. international economic policies became instruments of U.S. foreign policy as trade liberalization and foreign aid were used to strengthen noncommunist countries in the hope of increasing their resistance to Soviet expansionary efforts. (Baldwin)

Eventually, domestic enterprises would benefit through these policies: “The U.S. share of industrial country exports rose from 25.6 percent in 1938 to 35.2 percent in 1952, while the combined export share of Germany and Japan fell from 24.0 to 11.4 percent between these years” (Baldwin). The United States has created an empire full of enterprises that it can capitalize on at any time while also spreading its views democratic and economic values. America’s desires to eradicate the Soviet Union became a platform for free trade and a democratic globe.

Works Cited

Baldwin, Robert. “U.S. Trade Policy: Recent Changes and Future U.S. Interests.” The American

Economic View Vol. 79 No. 2 (1989): 128-132. JSTOR. Web. April 11, 2018.

Eckes, Alfred. “Trading American Interests.” Foreign Affairs. Council on Foreign Relations, Fall

1992. Web. April 11, 2018

Rieger, Michael. Foundation for Economic Education. Web. April 11, 2018.