I have spent a career learning that the distance between a trading partner and an enemy is measured not in miles but in the quality of the agreements between them. When I negotiated with Britain in 1794, my purpose was not to secure the most favorable tariff schedule for American merchants — it was to build a framework durable enough to survive the next dispute without resort to arms. A tariff set by passion rather than by treaty is a challenge thrown down; a tariff set by deliberate compact is a rule both parties have agreed to obey. The distinction is not semantic. It is the difference between commerce and conflict.

Tariffs, considered in themselves, are a legitimate instrument of government. A nation may tax imports to raise revenue, to protect an infant industry it judges essential, or to rebalance a relationship it finds persistently unfair. I do not quarrel with that power. What I quarrel with is the impulse to wield that instrument unilaterally, without notice, outside any agreed framework, and then to call the result a negotiating position. That is not negotiation. It is provocation dressed in commercial language. The party on the receiving end does not hear a proposal; it hears a demand, and demands answered with counter-demands produce nothing but escalating injury to ordinary people on both sides who had no voice in the quarrel.

The deeper principle is this: when a nation enters a trade agreement — whether a bilateral compact or a multilateral convention — it pledges its public faith to the terms. To withdraw from those terms by executive decree whenever the terms prove inconvenient is to announce to every future negotiating partner that American commitments are conditional on American mood. That announcement will be remembered. The credibility of a nation's word is capital; it accumulates slowly and dissipates quickly. I watched the young Republic struggle to be taken seriously because its predecessors under the Articles of Confederation could not bind themselves to honor even the Peace Treaty they had signed. I would not repeat that lesson.

What, then, should a responsible government do when it believes a trading relationship is genuinely unfair? It should invoke the dispute-resolution mechanisms it agreed to when it joined the relevant convention. It should build coalitions with other parties who share its grievance. It should negotiate revisions through proper channels — and if those channels fail entirely, it should withdraw in good order, with adequate notice, and accept the consequences of that withdrawal openly. What it should not do is treat tariffs as a weapon to be fired first and explained later. Treaties are law. Trade policy conducted as if it were warfare becomes, eventually, warfare.