It's the Brian Marrishow on WNIC.

Good morning again, everyone.

Now we continue our WNYC Centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things.

It's thing number 83, 100 years of tariffs and

trade wars, which, by the way, we already had planned for today before the stock market

tank last week over the Trump tariff bombshells announced last Wednesday. The 1920s started

an era of tariffs too. A hundred years ago, maybe you've heard of

the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariffs Act of 1930, which many experts think contributed to the Great

Depression being as bad as it was. And some even think, and I didn't know about this until I

started doing research for this segment, We'll ask our guest about it.

Some even think the fallout in Europe from the smooth-holy trade war

helped cause banks to fail there, contributing to the desperate conditions that allowed Hitler and Mussolini to rise.

And of course, we'll get to the Reagan and Clinton globalization era and the backlash to

that that helped give us Trump and the creep toward authoritarianism today.

Is there a sweet spot between trade and protectionism that 100 years of history can help

us find?

My guest for this is Michael Froman, president of the

Council on Foreign Relations think tank. He served in all eight years of the Obama administration,

first as Deputy National Security Advisor for International Economic Affairs, then as the U.S.

Trade Representative. And he recently wrote a really thoughtful article in

Foreign Affairs magazine about how we tried to bring China into our economic model, but instead

they're bringing us into theirs. We'll spend the first part of this segment doing the historical

...