With the global economy staggering, wealthy countries need to pull together to produce a concerted economic stimulus, protect free trade and rescue the poor and small countries that cannot possibly make it on their own. What the world is getting? from the United States Congress and other governments? is the kind of policy blunders and retrenchment that unleashed the global depression almost 80 years ago.

The beggar-thy-neighbor policy-making that spread in the late 1920s and early 1930s should provide a bleak warning. The United States sparked depression across the world when it started raising interest rates in 1928 to curb stock speculation, forcing other countries, whose currencies were fixed under the gold standard, to do the same to stem an exodus of reserves. But it spread and deepened as the United States and other countries responded to slower growth and falling exports with trade barriers.

World trade contracted 60 percent between 1929 and 1932. Industrial production in the United States and Europe fell by more than 35 percent. Unemployment topped 30 percent in Germany. The price of Malaysian rubber fell 84 percent, and that of Argentine wool tumbled 72 percent. Beginning in 1931, all big Latin American countries defaulted on their debt. Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931. Hitler came to power in 1933.

The world is different today. Economic links have deepened as companies have set up worldwide production networks. Multilateral institutions, including the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund, police an open economic order. We have learned some of history’s lessons. But not enough.

Russia and India are already raising tariffs on cars and steel. Anti-dumping tariffs are on the rise around the world. The European Union is reintroducing trade distorting subsidies. And the“Buy America”clauses in both the House and Senate versions of the fiscal rescue package are disturbingly reminiscent of the Smoot-Hawley tariffs levied by the United States in 1930.

Instead of fanning the flames, the United States should be dousing them? fast. It should cajole other countries, starting with those in the European Union, to spend more than they have been willing. It must work with the I.M.F. to help craft and finance rescue packages for developing countries that are being shut out of capital markets and can’t pay for their own fiscal stimulus.

First, the Obama administration must free America’s stimulus package from its protectionist shackles and ensure that it is big and open? as large as the crisis that threatens this country and the rest of the world.