In what world? I'm too young to remember earlier times, but in the past 25 years the US has only ever been pushing for borderline if not outright protectionist pro-US policies.

Exhibit A: copyright law. Exhibit B: patent law. Exhibit C: privacy/data protection law.

Anywhere they have an edge, the US aggressively arm-wrestles third parties into submitting themselves to trade deals that makes them keep subservient to whatever, and present their accomplishments to voters as "free trade" deals. It's not.

It's a bit like "peace process". It's code word for whatever American interests align to. Try to find any reference of the US being against a peace process. You won't.

And on balance we experience trade deficits. It's nice to have a free trade environment when it's reciprocal, but what has happened is that economies like Japan and China can play loose with the definition of free trade than most, and we kind of just put up with it. Few presidents and congress are willing to push the issue hard. Maybe Trump will finally call their bluff and impose sanctions.

America has never had a 'reciprocal' free trade agreement, it has used the banner of free trade to engage in low level asymmetric trade wars. The stupid mistake they made was to ship their production capability to China, Japan got where they are under their own power, though the degree to which the Japanese bought Japanese products (mainly because of quality) meant that American products with a Japanese equivalent never stood much of a chance of being adopted in Japan.

Free trade is based on merit (quality) and production capability, America has made some costly mistakes with both.

Sanctions will hit the American consumer harder than the exporters.

The Japanese engaged in and got away with things like tariffs on Rossignol under the made up excuse that Japanese snow is unique, and thus only Japanese skis were fit for skiing in Japan. Sure, their snow in some places is "wetter", but we now see western skis doing well there and Japanese skis performing well on non Japanese snow. That's the kind of nonsense our leadership should have stood up to.

Indeed, that is nonsense.

Rossignol is a French company by the way.

But I don't see anything exceptional there, it is similar to the nonsense America engages in vv Canada when it comes to dairy, beef and lumber.

I knew Rossignol was French. It was emblematic of Japanese tactics back then where they engaged in passive aggressive trade manipulation.

> And on balance we experience trade deficits.

Why are trade deficits necessarily bad? The trade deficit represents the spread between savings and investment. If net foreign investment in America is very high, then there will be a trade deficit. This is an accounting identity.

Household debt as a percentage of GDP has been declining in the US for the past decade. This leads one to believe that the trade deficit currently represents high foreign investment in the US.

> And on balance we experience trade deficits.

For years we've been exporting our inflation to other countries for actual physical goods and they keep buying it under the auspices of "reserve currency".

How many trillions of dollars of US debt does China own these days which they happily exchanged to fuel our consumerism?

How is it nonsense that an American manufacturer fails to compete with a foreign manufacturer?

This is fundamental economics, and why tariffs exist.

>They're not 'allowing' free trade, they have been pushing it

I think you're mincing words and avoiding the main argument. Wether or not the US government is "pushing" or "allowing" doesn't alter the affect on the US manufacturing sector and jobs overall. I suspect from a corporations' point of view, they are "pushing" it, from labor's point of view, they are "allowing" it. Both political parties embrace it and as it is today, it benefits corporations immensely at the expense of the US manufacturing sector.

American companies have actively moved their manufacturing to other countries to save on labor, nobody forced them.

This resulted in lower prices but was a net negative for the American job market.

America was totally free to engage in free trade by exporting their local products abroad, and by accepting foreign products to be sold in their own market without gutting their production capacity.