| Summary/Abstract |
This article suggests that a powerful defence for open trade can be derived from offensive realism. Offensive realists posit that a state tries to maximize its relative material power in order to protect its security in the dangerous international realm. I argue that with regard to trade, relative power maximizing states have strong incentives to maintain free trade. Mainstream trade theories commonly suggest that an important mechanism through which trade affects a state's material capacity is specialization, which advances trading states' allocative and productive efficiency. When specialization is prioritized, the international trade structure is likely to be composed of multiple players, or be ‘multipolar’, and protectionist states are likely to encounter significant relative losses vis-à-vis other states. In the multipolar trade structure, even when a state is facing relative losses from existing commercial exchanges, employing extensive protectionist policies would weaken the state's relative power as it would incur even larger relative losses. In the offensive realist world where the failure to maximize relative power is dangerous, protectionism needs to be avoided precisely because it does not allow for power maximization. This argument is substantiated by an examination of the United Kingdom's decision to avoid protectionism during the decades leading up to First World War.
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