‘I, Pencil’ defined free trade — Trump’s tariffs are writing the sequel

On Sept. 17, 2024, thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies exploded in the hands and pockets of alleged Hezbollah operatives across Lebanon and Syria. Intelligence sources believe the Israeli government carried out the operation in retaliation for the terrorist attacks committed on Oct. 7, 2023.

Israeli agents reportedly intercepted the devices — manufactured overseas — and modified their batteries to include small amounts of explosives. However one feels about this novel form of retaliation, it serves as an explosive reminder of how critical a country’s supply lines are to national security.

For decades, the global liberal economic order has operated on the assumption that nations could stretch supply chains across the world to maximize efficiency and profit — with little risk. Leonard Read’s classic essay “I, Pencil” illustrated the idea, celebrating how no single person or country could manufacture a pencil alone. It highlighted how markets, when left to coordinate production across borders, could reach extraordinary levels of efficiency.

If global trade remained stable and secure, national self-sufficiency seemed unnecessary. Countries could rely on the global market to supply even critical goods — so long as the U.S. Navy kept shipping lanes open. Under Pax Americana, the thinking went, every nation could specialize in what it did best and enjoy the shared prosperity of free trade.

The global trade system rested on the assumption that American military dominance would continue indefinitely. That belief led to some baffling choices.

A shocking share of goods essential to U.S. national security are produced almost entirely in China — including antibiotics and components used in American military hardware. The idea that a country would rely on semiconductors from its primary geopolitical rival to launch a missile defies basic strategic logic. Yet that is exactly what the United States has done.

Defense contractors have prioritized profit, operating under the assumption that global trade is both reliable and free from political risk.

While this approach always carried serious risks, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed its full recklessness. Fears of contagion and widespread labor shortages disrupted global trade, causing economic shocks and widespread shortages of consumer goods.

More urgently, the pandemic revealed that critical medical supplies — such as ventilators — were largely manufactured in China, where the virus originated. Despite this wake-up call, the United States has yet to reshore production of many essential medicines. Yet we still rely heavily on China for antibiotics and other critical pharmaceuticals.

The pandemic and Israel’s pager attack made one thing clear: The era of supply chains divorced from security concerns is over — if it ever truly existed.

The global liberal economic order operated on the assumption that American dominance would go unchallenged. Under that model, it seemed economically irrational for any country to sabotage goods it sold to the United States. Nations believed they could depend entirely on foreign production because the reach of American power would keep economic exchanges politically neutral.

But Israel didn’t manufacture the pagers that wound up in the hands of Hezbollah operatives. It simply accessed the supply chain and modified those devices. These weren’t weapons or advanced military systems. By tapping into the logistics of basic consumer electronics, Israel was able to inflict serious damage on its enemy.

This illustrates the core vulnerability of today’s trade model.

Donald Trump has long argued that Americans are getting a raw deal in the current global economic system. While the United States has embraced free trade, many of our allies — including the United Kingdom, Canada, and Israel — have maintained protective tariffs.

Meanwhile, China has benefited from open access to U.S. markets despite its use of centralized planning, currency manipulation, and widespread intellectual property theft.

Trump has made clear that his goal is to reverse this imbalance. For both economic and national security reasons, he intends to use tariffs to secure better trade agreements and bring as much manufacturing as possible back to the United States.

Some disgruntled mainstream conservatives — particularly at publications like National Review — have joined leftist politicians and media voices in sounding the alarm over efforts to build an economic order that prioritizes U.S. interests. For many neoconservatives, free trade has become a kind of orthodoxy. They treat economic predictability — even within a broken system — as more important than restoring national sovereignty.

NeverTrump conservatives often dismiss the president’s trade agenda as outdated or uninformed. They mock his focus on reviving the American middle class. Among the D.C. elite, working- and middle-class Americans from “fly-over” states are often treated as relics of the past — easily replaced by foreign labor in a gig-based, service economy.

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