It is almost half a century since the great and the good of the postwar Western world forged a new economic order, based on the belief that a regime of liberalized trade would increase human welfare. The British, as is their habit, claimed the credit, in a bit of doggerel that the economist Jagdish Bhagwati of Columbia University calls “the characteristic arrogance of the metropolitan elite toward the ex-colonial nouveaux riches”:

In Washington Lord Halifax
Once whispered to Lord Keynes:
It’s true they have the money bags
But we have all the brains.

But more dispassionate observers credit the Americans with insisting on a liberal trading order, and creating the institutions necessary to its implementation. Among these was the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), an institution responsible for overseeing progressive reductions in world tariffs. Bhagwati estimates that successive GATT negotiation rounds saw the average U.S. tariff decline by about 90 percent between the end of World War II and the conclusion of the Tokyo round in 1979.

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