A podcast interview

 Several weeks ago I was contacted by a young man named Eddie Carson, a dean at a private school in Vermont.  Somehow he had come across my autobiography, A Life in History, and had also become a fan of historyunfolding.  He invited me for an episode of his podcast and we taped it last week.  Here it is!

More thoughts on how we got here

 Testifying before the congressional committee investigating the Iran-Contra affair in 1987, Secretary of State George Schultz repeatedly declared, "Nothing is ever settled in this town."  History suggests that humanity has a deep yearning for certainty, for a resolution of certain fundamental questions, and for a guarantee of a stable future.  Yet history also shows how illusory all that is.  Somehow my life has prepared me for what is happening to the United States now.  By 1983, when I wrote a 20th anniversary piece in The New Republic looking back at the Kennedy years, I felt that our political system had been on a wrong track for over a decade.  In the next thirty years I saw the decline of my own profession and intellectual life in general, and now a near-contemporary of mine, backed by battalions of eager ideological warriors, is undoing the government and many parts of the world that I grew up in.  That, I am convinced, reflects another cornerstone of human nature--a tendency of certain younger generations to rebel against conventional wisdom, regardless of how wise it was.  And last but not least, every human institution, no matter how praiseworthy and inspiring at the moment of its birth, seems to grow old, lose its vitality, and become easy prey to those who can imagine a world without it.

I have pointed out here several times in the last 20 years that the historian Henry Adams made a related point well over a century ago in his presidential address to the American Historical Review dealing with the future of history as a science.  Historical science, he argued, could reach one of three obvious conclusions about the future of humanity.  First, it might decide that mankind would adopt socialism.  Secondly, it might eventually conclude that earlier generations were right and adopt a religious view of the past, present, and future.  And lastly, it might conclude that mankind would not change, and that evils like war and economic exploitation would continue.  Yet any one of those conclusions, he thought, would arouse determined opposition among powerful elements of our society.  I think that is a good analysis of what has happened over the last sixty years or so, not only in the historical profession but in society as a whole.  And increasingly, new forces are not merely attacking the conclusions of the historical profession, but the whole idea of science as a guide to politics and life.

Under Trump this seems to be clearest with respect to public health.  My maternal grandmother died in 1923, when my mother was ten, of postpartum strep, then known as childbed fever.  Within ten years, sulfa drugs could cure that frequently fatal illness, and penicillin followed within another decade.  As a child I read several books about the great medical discoveries of the past century, and I was in the first cohort of kids to receive the Salk vaccine---although I acquired my immunity to mumps, measles and German measles naturally.  I lived to see the end of smallpox.  Now more than three generations of younger Americans have grown up under the intellectual authority of the medical profession, and enough of them have rebelled to lead to the appointment of our most prominent vaccine skeptic as Secretary of HHS.  Significant numbers of parents refuse to vaccinate their children, and we are experiencing a measles epidemic that has killed three children so far.  

I don't think there is any legitimate excuse for this particular rebellion, but I do see plenty of evidence that we can't trust our highly educated population to do the right thing.  American medical care is now organized for profit, not simply to cure disease and save lives.  That is why big pharma has failed to develop desperately needed new antibiotics, preferring to research drugs that people will have to take for much longer periods of time.  And good science constantly encounters powerful enemies.  We all know that the processed food industry is poisoning us, but even Michelle Obama essentially caved in to the industry when she tried to make school lunches healthier.  It also seems that the fossil fuel industry has succeeded--and not only under Trump--in committing us to a continued, major role for it in energy production.  I keep wondering if that industry has secretly concluded that global warming is something that we will all just have to live with.  

Industry however is not the only institution to abandon the use of knowledge for the common good.  The same thing has happened in universities.  Identity-based ideologues have joyfully transformed literature and history over the last few decades, crippling their university enrollments and leaving themselves vulnerable to the counterattack that the Trump administration has begun.  Administrators have replaced scholars as the most numerous and influential university officials.   And K-12 education has apparently slipped even further, valuing students' self-esteem more highly than the pursuit of truth.

The modern bureaucratic state bases its power on superior knowledge of what we need.  Human nature being what it is, millions inevitably resent those claims even when the knowledge they rely on is true, and even more when it does not intuitively make sense.  Donald Trump, who has never shown much respect for anyone else's opinion, has exploited that resentment brilliantly.  The Democratic Party seems trapped in a defense of a status quo which obviously has serious problems.  Eventually, I am sure, the pendulum will swing back in the other direction and we shall begin restoring respect for truth--but for the time being, to paraphrase Orwell, millions are so sick of  hearing that 2 + 2 = 4 that they are willing to believe they equal 5, if only for a change.  That is part of the rhythm of history.

Elon Musk

 Over the past few weeks I have read Walter Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk.  History has been moving fast lately, and when this book appeared in late in 2023 Isaacson had no idea that Musk would endorse Donald Trump for President, much less that he would receive a mandate to reshape the federal government.  In another sense, however, that was fortunate, since the book deals with other more interesting and probably more important aspects of Musk and his career.  I learned a great deal and indeed am surprised by my ignorance of various key developments.

Born into an abusive family in South Africa in 1971, Musk appears to be severely autistic , as he freely acknowledges. That may be why he allowed Isaacson to follow him around for weeks at a time and apparently authorized anyone close to him--professionally or personally--to talk to him.  Musk sleeps very little, eats irregularly, and ingests huge quantities of Red Bull to keep him going.  He has little or no EQ, although he can be very needy himself.  He has an extraordinary personal history, recently documented at length in the Wall Street Journal, including at least fourteen children, many of them conceived in vitrio. And like Napoleon as a general and political leader or John D. Rockefeller as an industrialist, he is the most striking example of a new type that has transformed a key sector of society--in his case, the tech-based innovator.  And like Rockefeller, probably, he is now the richest man in the world.

Musk has now led three major enterprises, and Isaacson details each of their histories in great detail. The most important, probably, is his rocket company, SpaceX, which now occupies the position in the aerospace industry that NASA used to occupy.  Second is the Tesla car company, the world's leading producer of electric vehicles, and third is Twitter, which he acquired just a few years ago and renamed X.  While many liberals now argue that Musk depended from the beginning on help from the federal government, Isaacson argues that such help did not become truly significant until after he had built functioning rockets.  Based on other sources, I am not sure if Isaacson got this right or not.   Interestingly enough, Musk has pursued these interests with the conscious purpose of transforming how and where we live.  The goal of Space X is to increase our capacity for space travel sufficiently to allow us to establish colonies on Mars, which he thinks will prolong the survival of the human race. (Oddly, Isaacson gives  no indication that Musk has addressed the even greater problem of making it possible for large numbers of human beings to live there.)  Tesla was designed to free us from fossil fuels and the threat of climate change, and he acquired Twitter/X, he claims, to protect free speech--the least convincing of these three claims.  

Isaacson describes the creation of SpaceX and Tesla in great detail, revealing, it seems to me, what has made Musk a uniquely successful individual.  Musk has a remarkably quick mind, and he refuses to accept anything on faith.  (I must admit that I have that problem--or is it an asset?--as well.)  He was never simply interested in getting a NASA contract, he wanted to make enough rockets quickly and cheaply to support a continuing presence of Mars.  That meant, first of all, that rockets had to be re-useable, something that as far as I know the NASA pioneers of the 1950s and 1960s never dreamed of.  He has done that: his rockets now return to earth and make soft landings.  He achieved this by refusing to take no from an answer from his engineers and insisting that every part and process be re-evaluated to see if it could be simplified and cheapened.  Whenever that led to a brief setback, he told his subordinates not to worry:  if they did not occasionally try ideas that did not work out and had to be abandoned, they were not being creative enough.  Musk often sets seemingly impossible deadlines for his engineers, who at times manage to meet them.  Tesla has used the same philosophy.  He has also pushed the use of robots, although they have sometimes proven to be unable to do what humans do, and have had to be scaled back.  He apparently expects a heavily robotic economy to emerge in which everyone would be given a universal basic incomes--once again without thinking about the social and emotional consequences of such a scheme.  Keeping to my usual rule here, I am not welcoming or endorsing all this, simply recognizing that, yes, it is happening.   And it is happening because Musk identified the weaknesses of the civilization that we have all inherited.

That civilization was at least as transformative as Musk could ever be in its early stages, from the late 19th century until the late 20th.  Industrial manufacturing, new forms of energy, and revolutionary transportation advances completely altered our way of life.  Many of their advances, however, became legacies, which institutions kept alive without thinking or, at times, even understanding why.  Redundancies accumulated in both production, regulation, and administration.  Helped by our own revolution in data processing, Musk and others have begun clearing those redundancies away.  And Musk, it seems to me, is very unusual in his emphasis on making manufacturing as cheap as possible. (I do wonder if he has Japanese and South Korean counterparts in this respect--I do not know.)  Reading this book, it occurred to me that Musk's approach could also lead to much-needed reforms in higher education, which could use reductions in administrators comparable to the ones he imposed on Twitter, and some reductions in faculty as well.  The K-12 educational system might benefit from root and branch re-evaluations as well.  Such changes would have to be carried out by people who really cared about education, but the could do a lot of good.  And I am not prepared to argue that every bureaucrat in our federal, state and local governments is truly essential, either.  

Unfortunately, in my view, these changes are taking place through privatization, of which SpaceX is the most striking example.  And SpaceX is so important for the Ukrainian war effort--for which it supplies and maintains essential communications satellites--that Musk himself, according to Isaacson, stopped a Ukrainian drone attack on the Russian Black Sea fleet at one point during the war by turning off key satellites that controlled the drones.  Like the industrial revolution, today's changes are creating a new aristocracy, of which he is exhibit A.  That is not entirely the fault of Republicans.  Barack Obama  decided that SpaceX would take over the production of rockets from NASA.

In short interviews in the last few months, Isaacson has suggested that there is a certain logic to Musk's new alliance with Trump, even though he did not predict it in the book.  Musk had begun moving rightward on key issues during the 2010s, becoming very anti-woke, partly, according to Isaacson, because of the gender transition of his oldest biological son, from whom he became completely estranged.  The book does include one extraordinary story of Musk having dinner with his four oldest sons in April 2022, on the evening after he had bought Twitter.  They did not understand this decision, and he tried to explain it.  I quote from the book:

       "'I think it's important to have a digital public square space that's inclusive and trusted,' he replied. Then, after a pause, he asked, 'How else are we going to get Trump elected in 2024?'
        "It was a joke.  But with Musk, it was sometimes hard to tell, even for his kids.  Maybe even for himself.  They were aghast.  He reassured them that he was just kidding."

         That might have been a tactical family move.

         Musk's alliance with Trump, however, raises one huge question that I have not seen addressed.  Musk has built up Tesla to take over the world's car market and stop climate change--but Trump has clearly adopted the fossil fuel industry's view that climate change is something that we can live with, and seems to be doing away with the electric vehicle incentives that Biden put in place.  At times I wonder whether Musk is about to announced a gasoline-powered Tesla.   Only time will tell.

          I put down the book convinced that Musk is a world-historical figure like Carnegie or Rockefeller or the inventor of television, whom I cannot even identify.  Like them, he will have a very great impact.  That does not inspire me, but as I have said before, I am through arguing with history.

Facing the present, the future, and the past

 Many of my acquaintances, to varying degrees, are having emotional problems brought about by the daily news.  Hysteria has also gripped numerous op-ed writers for major newspapers and, I strongly suspect, various cable news commentators.  (I don't watch them.) I certainly agree that the United States and the world face a very serious situation in many ways.  Our  leadership not only wants to exert an unprecedented level of control over much of American life, but also lacks any real understanding of many important issues, and thus will make our lives worse on many fronts.  President Trump is abdicating from the role the US has played in the word since 1941.  Things will almost surely get a good deal worse before they get better, and by the time they get significantly better, many or even all of my contemporaries will probably have left the scene.  

I do  not share one of the worst symptoms of this emotional trauma:  the belief that changes so alien to what I think and feel simply cannot be happening.  This malady is very strong among op-ed writers like Thomas Friedman and among many historians because for decades they have presumed to tell us all what is wrong with the world and what should be done about it.  Such hubris pays well, but it often comes before a fall.  So it is today.  I don't share it, probably, because I have had to cope with the destruction of my own profession and of the discipline of history for about forty years, and because of my own historical work.  I spent many years studying the middle third of the twentieth century and have a keen sense of what made that period great, and how we have left its key features behind.  Looking back on the Vietnam War in 1999, I wrote, "The disintegration of the civic order that the war had begun still continues, and seems to be leading inexorably to some new and unforeseeable crisis."  That has come to pass.  

More than hubris, however, is involved.  For 250 years our society and the whole western world has cherished the idea of progress, and despite certain catastrophes on an unprecedented scale--the two world wars, and the effects of totalitarianism in the USSR and China, and elsewhere--we have lived through remarkable progress.  We naturally have come to assume that it will continue forever--but history never really did suggest that was the case.  Antiquity saw significant progress of many kinds, and particularly in the intellectual sphere, but that progress was largely interrupted for about 1000 years after the fall of Roman Empire.  A remarkable book, The Closing of the Western Mind, suggested to me that Christianity destroyed most of the intellectual heritage of antiquity in the same way that new ideologies have undermined our intellectual heritage in our own time.

I am also convinced that the human spirit will survive whatever lies before us.  Forty years ago I began teaching a course in historical fiction of the great crises of the first half of the twentieth century, including works by Pasternak, Malraux, Fallada, Orwell, Silone, and Solzhenitsyn.  Dr. Zhivago and The First Circle celebrated the ways in which extraordinary men and women kept their sense of the value of life alive in the most difficult circumstances imaginable.  I am going to give a shortened version of that course in a program for retirees this fall.  If Russians could endure those times, we can endure ours.

For more comfort I have turned to some short selections by the great German historian Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886), often regarded as the founder of modern history,  Not only did Ranke write multi-volume history of the papacy, England, France, and Prussia in the early modern period, he also thought a great deal about the purpose and the overall lessons of history--and by lessons he did not mean guides for action in the present and future.  His ideas on these topics are scattered among various works, and I have found an excellent 8-page collection of them online here.  No one has successfully translated Ranke into graceful English, but I think these passages are clear enough--and they have critical lessons for our response to the present, as well as the past.

Blind in old age--probably simply from cataracts--Ranke spent his last years dictating a world history, focusing on the development of civilization as he understood it. He scattered more general intellectual reflections through it.  Here are the first paragraphs that I want to discuss.

"It has often been noted that there is a certain contradiction between immature philosophy and history. Some thinkers have decided on a priori grounds what must be. Without observing that others, more doubting, will disagree with their ideas, they set forth to rediscover them in the history of the world. Out of the infinite array of facts, they select those which they wish to believe. This has been called the philosophy of history! One of the ideas which is continually repeated in the philosophies of history is the irrefutable proposition that mankind is involved in an uninterrupted progress, a steady development of its own perfection. . . .If [such a scheme] were somehow true, then universal history would have to follow a progression, and the human race would travel in its appointed course from one age to another. History would be completely concerned with the development of such concepts, with their manifestations and representations in the world. But this is largely not so. For one thing, philosophers themselves are extraordinarily at odds about the type and selection of these dominating ideas. Moreover, they consider only a few of the peoples in the world's history, regarding the activity of the rest as nothing, merely superfluous. Nor can they disguise the fact that from the beginning of the world to the present day the peoples of the world have experienced the most varied circumstances."

This paragraph defined the great vice of the historical profession: the tendency to start with a conclusion and mine the evidence to support it.  Nationalism (of which Ranke was remarkably free) and ideology probably provide many historians' conclusions ready made.  Thousands of pages have appeared explaining how the Confederacy should have been able to win the Civil War, or denying that Germany started the First World War, or celebrating Britain's political and moral superiority over continental European states.  At least 95 percent of the writing on the JFK assassination is devoted to proving one pre-selected thesis or another.  Marxist history inevitably looked for evidence that each class was playing its assigned role, and postmodern history sees every issue as a function of race, class, and gender.  All of these approaches, Ranke is suggesting, are historical dead ends, because they deny the complexity of history, which I would add reflects the complexity of human nature.

Continuing, Ranke presented his view of how historical knowledge could be acquired.

"There are two ways to become acquainted with human affairs: through the knowledge of the particular, and through the knowledge of the abstract. There is no other method. Even revelation consists of the two: abstract principles and history. But these two sources of knowledge must be distinguished. Those historians who disregard this err, as do those who see history as only a vast aggregation of facts which must be arranged according to a utilitarian principle to make them comprehensible. Thus they append one particular fact to another, connected only by a general moral. I believe, instead, that the science of history is called upon to find its perfection within itself, and that it is capable of doing so. By proceeding from the research and consideration of the individual facts in themselves to a general view of events, history is able to raise itself to a knowledge of the objectively present relationships."  This is what I attempted to do in my most ambitious book, Politics and War: European Conflict from Philip II to Hitler.  I spent the better part of a decade exploring Ranke's broader legacy, the enormous literature on European international politics from the mid-16th until the mid-20th century, with particular attention to four periods of general European war.  It took years, but that allowed me to establish patterns of conflict--what wars were about, and how successfully nations managed to achieve their aims--that changed over time.  Over the centuries power shifted from aristocracies to states, until in the era of the two world wars war became too big for European states to compete with even large entities.  

In lectures on world history delivered in 1854, Ranke tackled the issue of progress.  He rejected the ideas either that a supreme being was directing the course of events, or the Hegelian view of "an onward-marching progression of the spirit which necessarily drives [humanity] towards a defied goal."  He noted that the same political, intellectual and spiritual changes did not occur simultaneously in different parts of the world, with Asia losing ground to Europe since antiquity.  The movement of mankind, he wrote, "refers to the great spiritual tendencies which dominate mankind, which arise alongside one another, and which fall into certain arranged patterns. But in these tendencies there is always one certain direction which prevails over the others and causes them to recede. Thus, for example, in the second half of the sixteenth century the religious element was so overpowering that the literary was forced into the background. By contrast, in the eighteenth century, utilitarian efforts at social and economic improvement occupied such wide territory that the arts and related fields had to yield. In every epoch of humanity certain great tendencies are expressed. Progress consists in this: in every period a certain movement of the human spirit is revealed, by which for the first time one or another tendency becomes pre-eminent and maintains itself in its own way."  Technological and intellectual changes, I would argue, are changing fundamental aspects of human life and culture once again, and we cannot foresee the outcome.  Then Ranke comes to the heart of the matter.

"To adopt a contrary point of view, asserting that progress consists in each epoch's raising the life of humanity to a higher power, and that every generation is more perfect than the preceding one, with the later always the preferred one, the earlier ones only porters for the following generations, would be a divine injustice. For such a preceding generation would have no significance in and for itself. It would become meaningful only insofar as it became the steppingstone [sic] to the next generation, and would not stand in any immediate relation to the divine. I would maintain that every epoch is immediate to God, and that its value consists, not in what follows it, but in its own existence, its own proper self. This value gives to the contemplation of history, and of individual lives in history, a unique delight, so that every epoch must be regarded as something valid in itself, fully deserving of such respect.

"Thus the historian must direct his principal attention to the way in which the people of a certain period thought and lived; he will find that, apart from certain unchangeable main ideas, every epoch has its particular tendency and its own ideal. Though every era has its own justification and its own worth, we should not overlook the results which it causes. Secondly, the historian must discover the differences between the individual epochs, in order to consider the inner necessities affecting the way in which they succeed one another. A certain sort of progress in the process cannot be denied. But I would not want to argue that it moves forward in a straight line. It is more like a stream, whose course winds about in its own way. It seems to me—if I may dare the remark—that God, existing in no particular time, gazes over the whole historic humanity in its totality and finds them all equally valuable. Although the idea of the education of humanity has some truth in it, from God's point of view all the generations of mankind have equal rights, and this is the way the historian too must regard them."

Here we have it: a blunt denial that history can be seen as one progress towards a pre-determined goal, and a declaration that every era deserves our respect.  I, a lifelong unbeliever, would revise the sentence, "I would maintain that every epoch is immediate to God" with "Every epoch highlights different features of human nature," while adding that, for better or for worse, they are all equally human.  I would similarly revise the second paragraph above.  Donald Trump has brought an unprecedented authoritarian style and approach to executive power to the White House, but that proves only, to me, that our institutions and traditions could only keep those tendencies in check for so long. The same apparently applies to the whole regulatory structure the government has built up since the New Deal, which the Trump Administration is now trying to eliminate.   Meanwhile, our deeply bureaucratized world, which includes our state, federal and local governments, our health care system, and our educational system, has become sclerotic and has failed to deal with many problems.  We are now heading in a new direction--the one development that history can reliably predict.

Ranke was twenty when the Napoleonic Wars ended, and he was never a soldier. He lived the rest of his adult life during an era of progress, interrupted by a brief an unsuccessful series of German revolutions in 1848-9 and the three relatively brief wars in the 1860s that created the German Empire, which he welcomed.   His views, in short, did not have to face the kind of crisis undergone by another great German historian, Friedrich Meinecke (1862-1954), who in 1946 had to write the very painful short work, The German Catastrophe.  Yet I believe that Ranke's views of history can help us deal with whatever the next few decades might bring.

Human history can inspire us despite the presence within its most impressive eras of cruelty and bigotry, especially if we situate those characteristics within the context of their time and recognize the long-term response to them.  Yes, the federal constitution of 1787 tolerated slavery where it was still legal, but opposing views towards slavery repeatedly generated huge political controversies from the constitutional convention itself all the way to the Civil War, which abolished it.  Wars throughout the ages have taken millions of lives--culminating in the two world wars of 1914-45--but peoples and nations have consistently shown extraordinary powers of recovery, and the greatest wars have often secured decades of peace for them, most notably from 1945 onwards in Europe and much of Asia.  And throughout the centuries, the arts have given us works of eternal value, many carefully preserved to this day, which confirm our very real kinship with men and women of eras past.  That remains the lesson of Yeats's great poem, "Lapis Lazuli," written on the eve of the catastrophe of the Second World War.  Our frustration with today's world--which for the moment remains relatively peaceable and prosperous--reflects the extraordinary good fortune that we have enjoyed for the last 80 years.   They two have had their own tragic episodes in South Asia, in China, in Vietnam, and in many other places as well, but they have compared very favorably with many earlier periods.  

For four years, early in my career, I helped teach  a course, "The Uses of History," at the Harvard JFK School of Government.  I eventually concluded, however, that the real function of history was defined by Dr. Johnson as the function of literature: "Better to enjoy life, and better to endure it."  And rereading these lines of Ranke's, I understood why I have never had a moment's doubt about my vocation as an historian.

"To make a true historian, I think that two qualities are needed, the first of which is a participation and joy in the particular in and for itself. If a person has a real fondness for this race of so many, so varied, creatures to which we ourselves belong, and for its essential nature, always ancient and somehow always new, so good and so evil, so noble and so brutish, so refined and so crude, directed toward eternity and living for the moment, satisfied with little yet desirous of everything; if he has a love of the vital manifestation of humanity at all, then he must rejoice in it without any reference to the progress of things. To his observation of humanity's virtues he will add an attention to its accompanying vices, to its happiness and misfortunes, to the development of human nature under so many varied conditions, to its institutions and customs. In summary, he must seek to follow the kings who have ruled over the races, the succession of events, and the development of the chief undertakings. All this he should do for no purpose other than his joy in the life of the particular individual, just as we enjoy flowers without considering to which genus of Linnaeus and Oken they belong. Enough: he must do this without thinking how the whole appears in the individuals.

"But this is not enough. It is essential that the historian also have an eye for the universal. He ought not to conceive of it a priori as the philosopher does. Rather, his consideration of particular individuals will show him the course which the development of the world as a whole has taken. This development is related, not to the universal ideas which have ruled in one or another period, but to something completely different. No people in the world has remained out of contact with the others. This relationship, inherent in a people's own nature, is the one by which it enters into universal history, and must be emphasized in universal history."

The first paragraph explains why I have never had a boring or unhappy moment in an archive, and why I still find magic in the stacks of Widener library, even though I very rarely see another person during my visits there.  The second expresses the real nature of historical change--unpredictable, often random, never final, and often spectacular.  It gives all of human history the capacity which Orwell, another inspiration of mine, ascribed to England in his pamphlet, The Lion and the Unicorn, and which I already paraphrased at the end of Politics and War:  human history, like all living things, has the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same.  These are much easier truths to live by in periods of relative quiet in which generations like Ranke's and mine grew up, but those who can still grapple with them can fit literally anything into a broader sense of history that remains inspiring.

Some comments on tariffs

 Yesterday I was talking about Trump's tariffs with my wife, and it suddenly occurred to me that the way that President Trump has structured the discussion of them makes no sense.  The United States currently has a trade deficit of about $1.13 trillion a year, but one cannot understand it by looking at bilateral trade relationships with other countries and the EU.   A trade deficit comes from importing too much of something and exporting too little of something else, and nearly every commodity can be bought or sold from a number of countries.  This morning an economist makes the same point in the New York Times. Meanwhile, I had gone to the web and found some of the statistics I was looking for: a breakdown of imports and exports by major categories, showing what commodities contribute the most to our deficit.

There is literally nothing on this list that the US does not both import and export, and I have not been able to find statistics on the total production of various entries in the United States, which would help as well.  Still the figures tell a remarkably simple story.  First of all, four categories of goods generate 81 percent of our trade deficit:  machinery, nuclear reactors and boilers (24.7 percent); electrical and electronic equipment (24 percent); vehicles other than railway or tramway (21.9 percent); and pharmaceuticals (10 percent).  US exports in those categories total $ 704 billion, but their imports total $1.621 trillion,  The leading car exporters to the United States are Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Canada, and Germany, and the administration has dropped new tariffs against Canada and Mexico (whose plants, I believe, are mostly American brands) for the time being.   I haven't found country-by-country data on electronic imports, but they seem to come mostly from the Far East--Japan, China, South Korea, and Taiwan--with some from Europe.  I don't think that any televisions are made in the United States any more, although I could be wrong.  Imported machinery --the single biggest item in the deficit--comes from other industrial powers.

Net on the list are nine items that account for between 5.6 and 1.9 percent of the overall deficit: furniture, unspecified commodities (??), articles of apparel, toys, games, and sporting goods, iron and steel articles, footwear, rubber goods, and beverages of all kinds.  Most of those items, I suspect, come from Asia.  Raw aluminum, iron and steel add another 2.4 percent.  No other commodity accounts for as much as 2 percent of the deficit.  

Meanwhile, on the other side of the ledger, the only industrial product for which the US has a substantial export surplus is aircraft and spacecraft.  The surplus is $98.3 billion, compared to our deficit of $279 billion in machinery.  Our three other leading export surpluses are cereals (that is, grains), equal to 1.9 percent of our trade deficit; oil seeds and fruits at 2.4 percent of it; and "mineral fuels, oils, and distillation products," at 6.1 percent.  

Now it should be obvious, it seems to me, that tariffs designed substantially to reverse our trade deficit should focus on the imports that are primarily responsible for that deficit: machinery, electronics, vehicles, and pharmaceuticals.  Of those four categories, pharmaceuticals look to me to have the best chance of rapidly substituting domestic for foreign production--and I don't know how many jobs such a substitution would be likely to create. The other three would take years to substantially expand production, as well, in many cases, as expertise which we may no longer have.  If the US really set a goal of expanding production in those areas--and I am not saying that it should--wouldn't it make more sense to pass a small tariff on those goods now that would gradually increase for a period of years, thus making domestic production more profitable in the long run?  Such a policy would also have inflationary effects, but it could increase domestic production in various industries.  

As the Times op-ed notes, however, these tariffs appear to have been imposed without any serious analysis to back them up.  They could provide leverage to reach new agreements with individual countries, but what objective will those agreements have and how could they achieve it?  And that leads me to a different set of reflections on what President Trump seems to be trying to do--another occasion where the dreaded Hitler analogy is simply unavoidable.

I don't know how many people realize now that the Second World War occurred because both Germany and Japan wanted to create huge self-sufficient empires.  Hitler wrote and talked about this frequently and at length, as I discussed in my first book, Economic Diplomacy and the Origins of the Second World War.  The future, he thought, belonged to superstates on the scale of the British Empire, the United States, and the USSR.  Germany needed much more territory not only for raw materials, but above all for food.  During the 1930s, I found, Hitler and his collaborators found ways to keep Germany fed--barely--while substantially reducing imports and spending precious foreign currency mainly on critical raw materials.  They also tried to use synthetic oil to make the country self-sufficient in energy until they could conquer the oil fields they needed in Russia.  Hitler deeply resented dependence on international trade, in part because he thought that Jews controlled it.  The Japanese and the German economies were both hurt badly by the after-effects of the First World War, which led to overproduction of many commodities, and by the Depression, and that gave the idea of autarky more appeal. 

It turned out, of course, that their plans were doomed.  They were strong enough to unleash wars with Britain, the United States, and the USSR, but totally unable to match their production of key weapons, leading to their complete defeat.  I don't think Trump's plans have anything to do with preparation for war, but I think that his attempts to escape from dependence on the world economy are equally doomed to failure.  Once again an egotistical political leader thinks that he can rewrite the laws of economics, and finds himself in a position to do so.  He too is likely to be disappointed, with fateful consequences.