The conventional wisdom is that Donald Trump has broken the global trading system. He has flip-flopped on Chinese sanctions, started a tariff war with allies, and even prompted French president Emmanuel Macron to predict that the G7 may turn into the “ G6 plus one”.
All this aside, it is naive to think that once Mr Trump is out of office, multilateralism will somehow rematerialise. The truth is that this US president is the symptom, not the cause of the problem. While his policy lurches capture headlines, the real story is that the multilateral trading system has been under pressure for some time from deep structural changes in the global economy, namely the rise of China, the shift to a digital economy, and the economic and political disruption those two changes have wrought.
Even if Mr Trump were gone tomorrow, nobody today in the US could run for president and win on a “let’s go back to the 1990s” platform. Laissez-faire trade and globalisation in general are under fire in the US (as well as in Europe and any number of developing countries).