Trade Wars Are Spawning ‘Open Plurilateralism’: Clive Crook

President Donald Trump’s second term marked an extraordinary shift in US trade policy – from qualified support for rule-based multilateralism to its outright repudiation. At a stroke, the Liberation Day tariffs broke every promise on trade the US had made to its economic partners, declaring that the US would no longer be abused and undermined by the global system it had designed and led.

The president’s trade-policy revolution has encountered setbacks, but the administration is adapting. Its determination to wage trade war against the rest of the world has been checked but not halted, and its former partners are struggling ...