Professor Mihir Desai: Well, it's certainly the case that the population seems particularly upset with globalization. The question is whether they really understand what the alternative is—which is a set of bilateral agreements that could take years or decades to put together. So, the way we're currently structuring global trade is through arrangements with the World Trade Organization as well as some regional agreements. Once you start to append those, you end up in a world where you are negotiating bilaterally with countries—country on country. And that is where the world used to work 50, 100 years ago, but it's actually quite cumbersome and can lead to a great deal of retaliation. That retaliation is ultimately going to hurt American consumers and, in particular, the lower to middle classes who consume a lot of those goods. So, the perversity of all this is he's selling something to the population which is probably contrary to their interests.

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