Politics & Power Quote by W. Averell Harriman

Trade becomes a quiet rebuke to the fairy tale that tariffs cause wars and free markets prevent them. Harriman is reaching for a pre-1914 fact that sounds like a moral: Germany and Britain, two manufacturing powerhouses, were each other's best customers. If commerce automatically pacified rivalries, the Great War should have been unthinkable. It wasn't. The line works because it undercuts a comforting economic determinism without rejecting economics outright.

Harriman's hedged phrasing ("I think I'm right in that") is revealing. He's not performing the historian's certainty so much as the policymaker's pragmatism, recalling a pattern to steer an argument in the present. As a New Deal-era operator turned Cold War diplomat, he lived inside systems where trade was never just trade: it was leverage, signaling, alignment. By stressing that "it wasn't tariff policies alone", he pushes against single-cause explanations that let governments off the hook. Market ties can deepen interdependence while leaving intact the drivers of conflict: security fears, imperial competition, alliance commitments, nationalist prestige.

The subtext is aimed at his own century's debates. In the postwar order the US helped build, trade liberalization was sold as a peace project; Harriman is warning that prosperity and integration don't dissolve geopolitics, they rearrange it. Industrial rivals can profit from each other and still view each other as existential threats. His point isn't anti-trade. It's anti-naivete: if you want stability, you need institutions, credible security arrangements, and political choices that treat trade as one tool among many, not as a substitute for strategy.