Prosperity: The Coming 20-year Boom and What It Means to You.

• Author: Rodrik, Dani

by Bob Davis and David Wessel Times Books, $27.50

Pat Buchanan has a mission: He wants to make protectionism respectable. The American public, he thinks, is being fed a pack of lies about international trade and its consequences. The perpetrators are politicians who ignore the lessons of American history, cosmopolitan economists who disregard facts in favor of theories, and a coterie of business elites who lack any sense of patriotic duty. The victims are the working people of America who have fallen on hard times -- and for whom worse lies ahead unless the economic nationalism that made this country great is reinstated.

So goes the argument of Buchanan's new book, The Great Betrayal. This is unlikely to come as a surprise, unless you happen to have been on a different planet during the last two presidential campaigns and have never heard of CNN. Buchanan's fiery mix of conservative populism has long made him a household name. But this book is more than an ordinary political manifesto. It is Buchanan's attempt to rewrite American history through the prism of the import tariff Buchanan wants to take on the scribes who cherish free trade on their own turf. Hence a book packed with charts, footnotes, and references to the works of economists, living and dead.

Buchanan's interpretation of American history is straightforward: Great things happened whenever the United States raised its tariffs on imports. Washington, Hamilton, and Madison all "abhorred `free trade,'" Jefferson "ended his days as fierce an economic nationalist as Andrew Jackson," and Lincoln was "America's Great Protectionist." Import tariffs stood at 40 to 50 percent as America caught up with and surpassed Europe in manufacturing production during the five decades before World War I. The Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930 was not the highest in American history -- that honor belongs to the Tariff of Abominations of 1828 -- and in any case did not play a significant role in the Great Depression.

Buchanan thinks America's protectionist past should be the beacon for its future. He would like to see the U.S. declare its economic independence by imposing a 15 percent tariff on all imports that compete with domestic production. (Canada would be exempt provided it too adopted the 15 percent tariff.) But that is just the beginning. Developing countries would be hit by additional tariffs aimed at equalizing labor costs and calibrated to their wage differential with the U.S. Japan would also face...