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Before the Second World War, the states of Washington and Oregon were thinly populated economic backwaters of the United States. Even the major cities of Portland and Seattle were dependent on agricultural industries, especially timber, for their economic health. That all changed during World War II and the Cold War.

By the dawn of the twenty-first century, the Pacific Northwest boasted a more diversified economy. Beer, tourism, and high tech moved in alongside timber and wheat as the region’s mainstay industries. In Washington, especially, a Cold War–driven military and national security state set up shop as an economic behemoth even as debates over the costs and consequences of the new Atomic Age raged.

Facing the World highlights these changes, as well as the politicians, business leaders, and ordinary people who helped bring them about. At the center of the story, Senators Henry Jackson, Wayne Morse, Slade Gorton, and Mark Hatfield; Congressman Tom Foley; and Governor Vic Atiyeh worked diligently for a generation to transform the region from insular and backward to cosmopolitan and forward-looking. Aligning the region with national security and international trade policies, these politicians made the Pacific Northwest economy what it is today.

Through extensive research in congressional and federal archives, historian Christopher P. Foss vividly brings to life the discussions, conflicts, and controversies that shaped this political era. Though it wasn’t perfect, its fading legacy of leadership is a lesson for our own time. Facing the World will prove a valuable resource to historians, political scientists, and civic-minded residents of the Pacific Northwest.

Global supply chain integration is not only a rapidly growing feature of international trade, it is responsible for fundamentally changing trade policy at international and domestic levels. Given that final goods are produced with both domestic and foreign suppliers, Ka Zeng and Xiaojun Li argue that global supply chain integration pits firms and industries that are more heavily dependent on foreign supply chains against those that are less dependent on intermediate goods for domestic production. Hence, businesses whose supply chain would be disrupted as a result of increased trade barriers should lobby for preferential trade liberalization to maintain access to those foreign markets. Moreover, businesses whose products are used in the production of goods in foreign countries should also support preferential trade liberalization to compete with suppliers from other parts of the world.

Fragmenting Globalization uses multiple methods, including time series, cross-sectional analysis of the pattern of Preferential Trade Alliance formation by existing World Trade Organization members, a firm-level survey, and case studies of the pattern of corporate support for regional trade liberalization in both China and the United States. Zeng and Li show that the growing fragmentation of global production, trade, and investment is altering trade policy away from the traditional divide between export-oriented and import-competing industries.