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President Trump wants to bring manufacturing jobs to the U.S. by using tariffs. About 40 years ago, the threat of tariffs actually worked for the auto industry during a different trade war. Stephan Bisaha of the Gulf States Newsroom looks back at that moment and why past success may make winning the trade war for today's autoworkers that much harder.
STEPHAN BISAHA, BYLINE: Let's zoom back to the '70s, the time of big American muscle cars. You add the Chevy Camaro, the Pontiac Firebird and, of course, the Ford Mustang.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: What makes Mustang No. 1? Personality.
BISAHA: Big personalities and big bodies made Ford, GM and Chrysler the dominant American brands. That's according to AJ Jacobs. He's a car industry historian at East Carolina University.
AJ JACOBS: They're basically making huge cars with big engines that get lousy gas mileage.
BISAHA: That lousy gas mileage became a problem when an energy crisis in the '70s kicked in. Gas prices jumped about four times. That was the opening needed for Japan's fuel-efficient cars to take over American roads.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: You asked for it. The Toyota Corolla two-door sedan, probably the most sensible car in the world. Forty-nine highway...
JACOBS: They're not pretty. They are not fast. They're not going to get you a girlfriend. But they're going to get you to work, and they're not going to make you broke.
BISAHA: American car companies like Ford, with their lineup of gas-guzzlers, just couldn't compete. Around the start of the '80s and President Ronald Reagan's first term, Congress threatened tariffs on Japanese cars.
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RONALD REAGAN: Shortly after we came to office, our administration discussed the auto industry's problems with the Japanese.
BISAHA: That's Reagan talking with Ford workers in Kansas City, and the clip is from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Now, Reagan did not like tariffs, but Congress' tariff threat gave him leverage. He used that to get Japanese automakers to create their own trade limits.
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REAGAN: They offered to voluntarily restrain auto exports to the United States.
JOHN MOHR: They call it voluntary, but it was basically like a voluntold (ph).
BISAHA: John Mohr is an auto historian at the College of Southern Maryland. He says to keep their hold on the American market, in the '80s, Japanese carmakers started opening U.S. assembly plants - Honda, Toyota, Subaru. And German automakers, like Mercedes and BMW, were not far behind. That made selling in the U.S. cheaper and limited the threat of tariffs.
MOHR: They were aware of what had happened with the Japanese makers. There was a fear that if they did not localize production, that something else might disrupt that relationship.
BISAHA: All this to say, tariffs - or at least the threat of them - worked. Japanese, German and Korean companies created tens of thousands of American jobs. President Trump's looking to pull off a similar trick with his 25% tariffs on car imports. But ironically, that past tariff success story means the U.S. has a lot less to gain from a trade war today, at least when it comes to cars, because those foreign plants are already here.
MOHR: There's not a lot of juice left in the orange to squeeze.
BISAHA: America also has a lot more to lose. A lot of those foreign cars assembled in the U.S. actually get exported. U.S. auto exports are about five times the value they were in 1970 after adjusting for inflation.
MOHR: If we really do, you know, an international global trade war, it's very likely that those exports will be imperiled. And the people whose, you know, jobs rely on those may find themselves out of work.
BISAHA: And again, those are American workers, meaning American jobs that came out of a different trade war could be threatened by one today.
For NPR News, I'm Stephan Bisaha in Birmingham, Alabama.
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