Last Wednesday, 2 April, Donald Trump’s ‘liberation day’, marked a new departure. There’s not even a pretence at playing by the rules anymore. This was a carnival of trade discrimination: open, delirious, triumphant. The husk of the WTO system, chewed up for decades by termites of all shapes and sizes, has been whacked with a large hammer. It is unlikely to be replaced by an orderly transition to geopolitically aligned trading blocs. Some of the United States’ closest allies are now being hit with the biggest tariffs.
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