This is from a Vox interview by Zack Beauchamp with Ganesh Sitaraman, a professor at Vanderbilt and "a longtime adviser to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA)":
Zack Beauchamp
Would you say that, broadly speaking, a progressive foreign policy is critical of free trade as an idea, maybe even open to the kind of tariffs that Trump has been willing to employ?
Ganesh Sitaraman
I think it’s the wrong binary to talk about free trade or protectionism. No one believes in either purely free trade or pure protectionism. And we know that because we have economic sanctions on various countries that lots of people support. Those are restraints on trade, and that’s well understood to be an appropriate tool that we use in our foreign policy and national security policy.
I think the way to think about it is when and with whom are we trading? In what ways and how are we building the rules around trade?
And I think that’s a place where progressives have a different view to where a lot of the consensus has been over the last generation, which I think is a little bit more concerned with concluding trade agreements and a little bit less concerned with what the distributional consequences of those trade agreements might be.
There was also this:
A second thing that I think we see is an interest in what I’ve called selective disentanglement. The idea here is that in areas of critical national security importance, we should think about having domestic capacity to be able to produce those goods or services.
It worries me that when asked directly about tariffs, he did not say what he thought of tariffs, and talked about "when and with whom are we trading" as the real question. My answer would be, as much as possible and with as many countries as possible. His answer seems likely to be different. And his approach to "national security" might not be very different from the current Trump administration Section 232 policies.
