The “Trump Spherical” of commerce negotiations, as Jamieson Greer, America’s commerce consultant, calls it, was meant to reassert American primacy. Peter Navarro, a longtime adviser to Donald Trump, even advised that the president deserved a Nobel prize in economics for exhibiting how the world’s greatest market can bend international commerce to its will. The White Home’s wager is that dismantling the outdated order, as soon as policed—nevertheless fitfully—by the World Commerce Organisation, will usher in a brand new one with America at its centre.
