From the New York Times on Michael Barbarale, this is the Daily.

Today, in announcing tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum,

President Trump said they would protect national security.

But what if the threat to national security are the tariffs themselves?

It's Thursday, March 8th.

Peter, when's the last time that we were in a big trade war?

The 1930s. That's the classic case of trade conflict yielding catastrophe.

Peter Goodman covers economics for the times.

From roughly 1870 till the First World War,

that's a period that economic historians consider the first wave of globalization,

where there's a lot of trade, a lot of development of new markets,

and the world's being knit together in a way in which it had not been previously.

World War I undid that and produced a lot of nationalism, distrust,

economic insecurity.

And all of this lives on through the first decades of the 20th century,

where you have this retreat to protectionism, to countries putting tariffs

and other sorts of restraints on trade to protect their domestic industries.

And the crescendo of this is this 1930s law adopted by a Republican-controlled Congress called the Smooth Holly Tarif Act.

A financial panic gripped the world, which comes as the US is sinking into the Great Depression.

For the majority, it means the interminable line outside factory gates,

desperately hoping for a job that rarely comes.

It means hunger and a march of the gun employed in the nation's capital.

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