So your claim is that you’re right and the journalists who prepared the Reagan documentary are wrong. But as noted below, it’s not just me and a few journalists who disagree with you, it’s a wide array of experts who’ve examined Reagan’s track record on trade. In case it’s not obvious, I have no interest in defending Reagan, but I do have an interest in defending the facts.
True enough, though one might wonder why he would make such strong and unequivocal statements in support of free trade if he was against it. Politifact looked into this question after Trump falsely claimed that Reagan had been a protectionist, and to do so they enlisted the aid of some half dozen experts including a Reagan biographer, a professor of international trade politics, a former Reagan White House official, and others. Their conclusion was that Reagan was on balance very much a free trader both in word and in deed, that is, both in his articulated ideology and in the general trend of trade policies in his administration. The caveat is that he would not hesitate to implement a protectionist policy if US interest were at stake, so those arguing that side can find evidence of protectionism, but it was a pretty minor part of his trade policies compared to things like the North American Free Trade Agreement, laying the groundwork for the World Trade Organization, implementing the Caribbean Basin Initiative, and vetoing bills for quotas on textile and clothing imports despite public pressure to do otherwise.
A few quotes from the article:
“Reagan was essentially a free trader, in large part because he saw trade as a means of winning the Cold War,” [Craig Shirley, a Reagan biographer] said.
… [The Reagan] administration launched the most comprehensive set of global trade-barrier-reducing negotiations yet completed — the Uruguay Round, which eventually established the World Trade Organization," said I.M. Destler, a public policy professor at the University of Maryland and author of the book American Trade Politics. (That negotiation continued under President George H.W. Bush and was concluded and ratified, with large bipartisan margins, under President Bill Clinton.)
In addition, the Reagan administration won approval of the U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement in 1988, which later incorporated Mexico and morphed into the North American Free Trade Agreement.
… Reagan also bucked public pressure by rejecting trade protection for the domestic shoe industry in 1985 and by vetoing bills in 1985 and 1988 that would have imposed restrictive quotas on U.S. textile and apparel imports.
The free-market Cato Institute noted upon Reagan’s death in 2004 that U.S. spending on imports roughly doubled between his election in 1980 and the end of his tenure in 1988. “If Reagan was a ‘protectionist,’ it had no discernible effect on the ability of Americans to spend freely in the global marketplace,” according to the Cato paper.
… After reviewing data from Reagan’s tenure, Destler has written that the impacts of Reagan’s protectionist policies were “marginal,” with the possible exception of the voluntary export restraints on Japanese cars. “On balance, Reagan was a free-trader,” Destler told PolitiFact.
