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 urged that the president deserved a Nobel prize in economics for displaying how the world’s greatest market can bend world commerce to its will. The White Home’s guess is that dismantling the previous order, as soon as policed—nevertheless fitfully—by the World Commerce Organisation, will usher in a brand new one with America at its centre.
