"When we turn to the regime of international trade law, as it has emerged in the post–Second World War era, we find an intellectual or conceptual foundation that, to be sure, assumes and assimilates the classic insights about the gains to wealth and welfare from free trade but is fundamentally concerned with the interdependency of different states’ trade and other economic policies—i.e., managing or constraining the external costs that states impose on other states by virtue of their policies. A paramount goal is the avoidance of a protectionist summum malum—the situation where domestic social or economic pressures lead some states to increase or reinstate barriers to trade, thus triggering a competitive reaction in kind by other states, and eventually a “race to the bottom” that is disastrous for the global economy. This sort of behavior was widely perceived by the founders of the Bretton Woods system to have led eventually to perilous instability in the interstate system and economic catastrophe in the interwar years—which phenomena were seen as having contributed to the climate that made fascism, and the Second World War itself, possible."