Follow this authorFareed Zakaria's opinions

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative promised to review the tariffs to determine whether they have been effective. It has been working on this review for about two years with no end in sight — despite apparently having little on its agenda these days (since it has abandoned its core business of promoting trade). A senior administration official confessed to me that the reason is that if USTR admits the tariffs have failed, it will also have to recommend that they be lifted — which the Biden team does not want to do.

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There is also a foreign policy cost to the rising protectionism in America. Biden met with his Japanese counterpart this week in a bid to strengthen the alliance between the United States and one of its closest allies. And yet his administration has announced its staunch opposition to a Japanese company buying U.S. Steel — a company that has been foundering for years and is a shadow of the behemoth it once was. Nippon Steel, the Japanese company, promises to invest in U.S. Steel, honor its labor contracts and retain all its workers into 2026. In short, it would rescue an underperforming American company. But the optics seem more important than the substance to the Biden administration.

The conventional wisdom of the past several years has been that America hollowed out its manufacturing base by embracing globalization and efficiency, which in turn led to the rise of right-wing populism. But that argument doesn’t stand scrutiny because countries like Germany and France, which protected workers and invested massively in retraining, have also seen right-wing populism boom. Declines in manufacturing are part of the economic rise of countries — notice that even China, which has prized its factories above all else, has seen manufacturing decline as a share of its economy, from 32 percent in 2011 to 28 percent in 2022.

People around the world, especially in America, have gotten used to the dramatic declines in cost that globalization has brought them over the past three decades. The cost of clothes, appliances, telecommunications and air........

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