The Trade Trap: How to Stop Doing Business with Dictators

This scattershot debut from Döpfner, CEO of Germany’s Axel Springer media conglomerate, argues that American and European trade with nondemocratic countries didn’t liberalize the latter, but instead made the former economically dependent on and politically subservient to dictatorships. He cites Germany’s 2011 decision to shutter its nuclear plants and import Russian natural gas for power, a policy that led to energy shortages and inflation when the Ukraine War cut off Russian gas supplies. Offshoring industries to China, Döpfner contends, has hollowed out Western economies and enabled China to push around businesses outside its borders, as when Mercedes-Benz, which relies on auto exports to China, bowed to negative press in Chinese media and apologized for quoting the Dalai Lama in a social media post. Döpfner’s account of fighting to free Axel Springer reporters imprisoned in Turkey and Iran drives home the stakes of the expanding influence of dictatorships. Unfortunately, his call for a Freedom Trade Alliance between democracies walled off from authoritarian nations by tariffs is sketchier, glossing over the inflationary effects of banning cheap Chinese manufactures and conceding that trade with tyrants in such products as oil and antibiotics would have to continue until alternative supply chains could be built. This makes an incisive moral case for a values-based trade policy, but the economic logic is weaker. (Sept.)