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It is important not to oversell trade’s inflation benefits as a cure-all, but at the margin, it can help. The next Administration should keep this in mind as it tries to cope with this politically volatile issue.

Trade and Foreign Policy. We have seen how trade liberalization would boost the domestic economy and make American businesses more competitive, but conservative trade policies also benefit America’s foreign policy interests. Policymakers should therefore:

• Negotiate multilateral and bilateral trade agreements.

• Reform the World Trade Organization or build a successor organization with membership limited to liberal democracies.

• Repeal the Jones Act to replace Russian energy imports with domestic production.

• Develop a multifaceted, long-term China policy that takes seriously America’s biggest foreign policy threat and deals with it on several fronts.

National Security. The most persuasive arguments against a market-oriented trade policy come from another national objective: national security. Protectionism and similar progressive policies tend to weaken American security, but trade creates peace. The more countries trade, the less likely they are to fight one another and the more robust their supply networks will be. Going to war with customers is bad for business.

Without a strong economic interest in continued U.S. investment and exports, for example, China’s behavior would likely become increasingly less predictable and more dangerous. Anyone who thinks Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary Xi Jinping and the government in Beijing are bad actors now—which they are—should consider what would happen if the Chinese convinced liberal countries like the United States to decouple from them, leaving them free to pursue whatever policies they wish without the significant counterweight that America can provide.

That is one reason for Xi Jinping’s emphasis on centralization and self-sufficiency. He does not like international pressure about his government’s human rights violations and bad-faith trading policies, and decoupling from trading partners like America is one way to avoid that pressure. A less constrained China would be poorer but much more unstable and dangerous to its neighbors and to America than it would be if it still had to engage regularly with the rest of the world.

Trade Promotion Authority. Trade agreements can take years to negotiate. One way to accelerate the process is for Congress to grant the President Trade Promotion Authority (TPA). It was first granted under the 1974 Trade Act, which