The case for (fair) free trade policies that will help the poor abroad and protect jobs at home.

In this provocative analysis Edward Gresser argues that American liberals are mistaken in their opposition to globalization. Gresser reviews the origins of liberal internationalism, going back to FDR’s 1941 speech on the four fundamental freedoms, including freedom from want. After World War I, isolationist and punitive economic policies had led to joblessness and hyperinflation in the former Axis powers, which in turn bred expansionist political and military ideologies. Freedom from want, in Gresser’s view, became a focal point for Roosevelt’s postwar domestic and international economic policies. This liberal tradition, carried on by leaders like Kennedy and Clinton, was essentially a vision of a global economy that can provide stability and prosperity around the world.

Yet liberal internationalism and trade policy has gone off-track in recent years, with modern American free trade policies having been misapplied or abandoned by President George W. Bush—but also, Gresser cautions, abandoned by American liberals. A return to these free-trade policies means removing isolationist policies such as legislative trade barriers, preferential trade agreements and protective tariffs, and returning to multilateral arenas. His analysis shows not only how our most recent trade policies perpetuate suffering and instability, but how liberals have unwittingly upheld them.

Freedom From Want urges liberals to remember where they came from and to move forward on fair free trade policies that will help the poor abroad and protect American jobs. The crisis of Islamic fundamentalism gives this book an added relevance, viewed in light of the last three decades of failure by world economic and political powers to eradicate economic stagnation and unemployment in much of the Arab world. The solutions to extremism may not be simple, but Gresser makes a powerful case that they must address “freedom from want.”

Ed Gresser is Director of the Progressive Policy Institute's (PPI) Project on Trade and Global Markets. In this capacity, he writes and speaks on the value of open markets, internationalism, and social responsibility in the global economy. Mr. Gresser's major focuses have included investigation of the American tariff system, Trade Promotion Authority and the future U.S. trade negotiating agenda, hemispheric integration, economic relations with China in the wake of WTO membership and Asian affairs, as well as international finance and labor issues. He also developed and oversees PPI's widely praised "Trade Fact of the Week" electronic information service.