No. I didn't. I said "Reagan-era" and stand by it.
Reagan was less of a dogmatic free trader than many in the conservative movement. He wasn't afraid to impose quotas on Japanese goods.
But the rhetoric of Establishment conservatism (National Review etc.) in the Eighties and Nineties was favorable to global free trade.
Buchanan was criticized for protectionism which conservative writers saw as closer to the Democrat than the Republican platform.
Those in the conservative Establishment who criticized or attacked Buchanan certainly didn't think they were attacking him from the right.
Maybe that's a Freudian slip.
My point was that who Reagan was and who people took him for, then as now, weren't always the same.
” No. I didn’t. I said “Reagan-era” and stand by it.”
That’s a fair point. I agree that Reagan’s position on trade as President differed significantly from what the conservative establishment was selling and people often conflate the two.
Ironically enough Buchanan was echoing the global free trade line at the very time when Reagan was far more protective of American companies that were coming under pressure from Japan, Japan being the only real threat to American manufacturers at the time. Buchanan didn’t change his tune until he challenged GHW Bush, when getting out into the hinterlands let him see what the widespread closing of factories was doing to small town America. For Buchanan it brought home the hard reality that adhering to dogma could inflict on little people, something I think that Reagan might have always known.
NAFTA, the emergence of China and the Asian Tigers as competitors, the collapse of the USSR all came after Reagan so we can only guess what his response would have been. But judging from his dealings with Japan it would seem that trade quotas would likely be part of it.