In his 1948 memoirs, Cordell Hull wrote that during his 12 years as US President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretary of state he was guided by the idea that “unhampered trade dovetailed with peace.” Tariff walls and battle lines rose together, he believed; tear down the first, and the second would fall. Hull’s conviction that commerce fosters peace reflected a venerable liberal tradition stretching back to the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant and the 19th-century British politician Richard Cobden.
In his 1795 book Perpetual Peace, Kant argued that republics bound by trade and law would naturally forswear war, while Cobden, a free-trade evangelist, held that economic interdependence rendered armed conflict materially ruinous and therefore irrational. US President Woodrow Wilson, who had lectured on Kant as a professor at Princeton University, carried this idealist notion into the 20th century.
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