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 steered that the president deserved a Nobel prize in economics for exhibiting how the world’s largest market can bend world commerce to its will. The White Home’s wager is that dismantling the outdated order, as soon as policed—nonetheless fitfully—by the World Commerce Organisation, will usher in a brand new one with America at its centre.
