Without marching through the policy errors of the following three decades, let us jump ahead to 2016 during a time when (as could have been predicted) the United States has lost vast amounts of its manufacturing sector to foreign competition due to the very system set up in the Nixon era, not to mention victory in the Cold War which opened up a new swath of the world to productive competition with the United States.
The new president Donald Trump swore to end the problem, and how? By blowing up the GATT which had been newly labeled the World Trade Organization.
In other words, Trump took a different tact from Nixon: he sought to patch a trade problem with a very old-fashioned system that had been wholly rejected back in 1944. Again, Hazlitt predicted something exactly like this in his writings, as he explained that nations with undisciplined fiscal and monetary problems, operating in a world without domestic convertibility, are bound to suffer monetary outflows and a deprecation of their production base due to foreign competition.
As a result of Trump’s efforts, which were not reversed by the Biden administration, the system of 1944 now lies in ruins with governments around the world newly experimenting with regional trading systems, tariff policies, and even new systems of settlement that could someday unseat the dollar as the world-reserve currency.