The “Trump Round” of trade negotiations, as Jamieson Greer, America’s trade representative, calls it, was meant to reassert American primacy. Peter Navarro, a longtime adviser to Donald Trump, even suggested that the president deserved a Nobel prize in economics for showing how the world’s biggest market can bend global commerce to its will. The White House’s bet is that dismantling the old order, once policed—however fitfully—by the World Trade Organisation, will usher in a new one with America at its centre.
