2026-07-30
54 分钟I’m Dan Kurtz-Phelan and this is the Foreign Affairs Interview.
The system itself was broken and I think there were a lot of reasons for that.
The biggest one was nobody really believes in free trade, right?
With the exception of, you know, the Harvard Economics faculty and a few anglophone politicians.
But everyone else realizes that you talk free trade, but what you want is surplus.
Almost no one in the last several decades has done more
to change the American approach to trade than Robert Lighthizer.
Lighthizer was US Trade Representative in Donald Trump's first term.
In that role, he set out to reverse Washington's long-standing commitment
to a global trading system.
A crusade using tariffs among other tools that targeted China above all,
but also any other country that as he saw it,
benefited from that system at the expense of the United States.
Lighthizer recently laid out his vision for a new trade order
in the pages of Foreign Affairs.
With Trump levying tariffs and wielding American economic power
against both allies and adversaries, Lighthizer argues that
the free trade system should be thrown out,
replaced with one that is more balanced, sovereign, and transparent.
I spoke with Lighthizer on the sidelines of the Aspen Security Forum