Peter Navarro, Donald Trump’s tariff adviser, opines: “For decades, under the biased rules of the World Trade Organisation, the US has faced systematically higher tariffs from its major trading partners and far more punitive non-tariff barriers.”

But the evidence against Navarro is overwhelming. In the 2025 edition of the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom, which compiles an annual “trade freedom” score for nearly 200 countries and political jurisdictions, the United States ranks in 69th place, putting the US lower than Singapore (1st), Australia (3rd), the United Kingdom (17th), Canada (18th), France (38th), and Germany (39th).