Tariff War: Free Trade's Betrayal and America's Fight Back

By Douglas Cameron Borthwick

Free trade until it's a weakness.

Everyone quotes Adam Smith for free trade. Almost no one reads what he said about when to break it. Two hundred fifty years ago the father of free trade named three exceptions in the same breath as the rule, and the loudest voices in today's tariff fight kept the rule and dropped the footnotes. This book picks them back up.

Douglas Borthwick spent thirty years on trading desks watching shocks land in real time: the Asian financial crisis, the currency devaluations, the rush into dollars when the world caught fire. He reads the tariff question the way markets actually work, not the way a headline does. Who really pays a tariff. What a dependence costs when a rival owns the switch. Why a country that cannot make its own chips, fuel, and steel has already given away something no cheap import ever buys back.

This Second Edition is fully revised and updated with the 2025 tariff war: Liberation Day, the escalation with China, the record customs revenue, the reshoring pipeline, and the Supreme Court ruling that reset who holds the tariff power. Every case is graded on Adam Smith's own tests, defended where it earns a pass and criticized where it does not.

Inside: Adam Smith's three exceptions to free trade, restored and applied to 2025Who actually pays a tariff, from a trader who watched the dollar move firstThe 2025 tariffs graded honestly on defense, retaliation, and fairnessThe cost of the closed factory that every cost-per-job study enters at zeroWhy "ally" does not always mean "open market," and what the numbers showThis is not free trade versus tariffs. It is the complete Adam Smith, and the fight America is having right now.

About the author: Douglas Borthwick is a Glasgow-born currency trader who traded for Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Standard Chartered, and TP-ICAP before leading the first SEC-registered security-token IPO. He holds a BS in Economics from Carnegie Mellon and an MBA in Financial Engineering from Yale, hosts the Old Men, New Money podcast, and is the founder and CEO of Skye Meta Corp.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0F4MWCKN8
• ISBN13: 9798319013378
• Release Date: April 2025
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 244 Pages
• Weight: 0.73 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"