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It's the Brianair Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone.

Now we continue our WNYC Centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things.

It's thing number 83, 100 years of tariffs and trade wars, which, by the way, we already had planned for today before the stock market tank last week

over the Trump tariff bombshells announced last Wednesday.

The 1920s started an era of tariffs too.

100 years ago, maybe you've heard of the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariffs Act of 1930,

which many experts then contributed to the Great Depression being as bad as it was.

And some even think, and I didn't know about this until I started doing research for this segment,

we'll ask our guest about it. Some even think the fallout in Europe from the smooth

Hawley trade war help cause banks to fail there,

contributing to the desperate conditions that allowed Hitler and Mussolini to rise.

And of course, we'll get to the Reagan and Clinton globalization era

and the backlash to that that helped give us Trump and the creep toward authoritarianism today.

Is there a sweet spot between trade and protectionism that a hundred years of history can help us find? My guest for this is Michael Froman, president of the Council on Foreign Relations think tank.

He served in all eight years of the Obama administration,

first as deputy national

security advisor for international economic affairs, then as the U.S. trade representative. And he

recently wrote a really thoughtful article in Foreign Affairs Magazine about how we tried to bring

China into our economic model, but instead they're bringing us into theirs. We'll spend the

first part of this segment doing the historical timeline like we always do in 100 years of 100 things,

and then we'll dig in on what's happening right now as markets tumble precipitously again

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