The Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade agreement negotiations, together with its proposals to revise international trade agreements and an expressed preference for new bilateral deals over multilateral ones, has shaken the bastions of free trade orthodoxy.
So shaken indeed, that the Chinese President Xi Jinping, even as he prepared to unleash a boycott of South Korean imports in response to the country’s installation of a missile defence system aimed at North Korea, was grotesquely hailed as the new champion of globalization by the international elite gathered at the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland.
