Biden has made it clear that he will not return to the full-throttled philosophical embrace of free trade that has characterized US policy for most of the post-WWII era. Under Republican and Democratic presidents from Truman to Obama, the US acted as the de facto leader of the multilateral trade system and propagated a pro free trade policy environment which facilitated the creation of extended global supply chains constructed almost entirely on the basis of achieving the greatest economic efficiencies. This “economics textbook” belief in the benefits and efficiencies of trade across highly specialized, far-flung supply chains had been broadly accepted for decades but is now being questioned.