National sovereignty was, obviously, not his highest priority. Countries working together to solve global problems was more important to him. Hence the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, the International Trade Organization and myriad others. Now polls show the republican base opposes all of those FDR creations.
He knew that republicans had unilaterally raised tariffs on the rest of the world 3 times from 1921 to 1930 and the middle class had paid the price.
One of his motivations in setting up the ITO/GATT was to make it more difficult for 'republicans' in any country to unilaterally raise tariffs in the name of national sovereignty as his predecessors had. He may not have known that some future Democrats would rue his actions and want to go 'national sovereignty' on the rest of the world like republicans had done in the 1920's.
Bill Clinton was lucky because the dot.com boom revved up our economy.
The old "Democrats are lucky" argument. I wonder why the dot.com bubble made Clinton so 'lucky' in terms of manufacturing employment but the great housing bubble under Bush saw that employment crash through the floor? Krugman has written that the dot.com bubble was not the main reason for the manufacturing surge under Clinton.
And our trade deficit is horrible. The percentage of the economy that is imported is rather irrelevant.
No. Facts like this are relevant.
If low tariffs were leading to high levels of imports creating a trade deficit despite a healthy level of exports, that is a totally different problem than one where a country has a low level of imports but an even lower amount of exports. Raising tariffs when imports are already low does not help much, though it can be emotionally satisfying, as republicans discovered in the 1920's.
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