Time & Perspective Quote by Lawrence Summers

Summers is doing what skilled economic technocrats often do: recasting a political demand as a moral accounting. The sentence sets up an implicit bargain - the U.S. tolerated other countries’ protectionism after World War II because rebuilding shattered economies was a higher priority than insisting on perfect free trade. That framing matters. It positions American openness not as naive idealism, but as a strategic subsidy: the U.S. “paid” in market access so allies and trading partners could stabilize, industrialize, and become prosperous.

The pivot word is “price.” Protection abroad isn’t treated as an equal policy choice; it’s cast as a temporary concession extracted from a generous hegemon. Once the “post-war recovery” rationale expires, Summers implies the legitimacy of that protection expires too. “Caught up” does double work: it’s a flattering acknowledgment of others’ success and a subtle way of saying they no longer deserve special treatment. Prosperity becomes the benchmark that triggers obligation.

Then comes the kicker: “level of openness.” Summers isn’t merely arguing for reciprocity; he’s claiming that openness is a mark of maturity, almost a civic virtue in the global economy. The subtext is pressure: if you’re rich now, you can’t keep using the training wheels of tariffs, state-led favoritism, or managed trade. It also smuggles in a U.S.-centric baseline, assuming America is (or should be) the model of liberalization, even as domestic politics routinely complicate that self-image.

Contextually, this is the language of the post-Cold War and early globalization consensus: free trade as both efficiency and discipline, with the U.S. as the rule-setter expecting others to graduate from exception to compliance.