All eras come to an end. Yes, that sounds terribly clichéd. But there is little doubt that the liberal international economic order the US established and has maintained since the late 1940s is coming apart and that we are back to the interwar period. It is, actually, not all President Donald Trump’s fault. Scour the shelves at your local bookshop and you may be surprised at the growing number of books on "the end of globalism" or the "end of liberalism". These build on the old harbingers of doom and gloom, like Robert Kaplan’s The Coming Anarchy, and The Economist’s warning in October 2011 that we should all be afraid. From a rather mainstream perspective there were at least two original problems that bedevilled the post-war liberal international order. The first was its high idealism. The second was the bargain that was struck – that international integration and co-operation would generate wealth, so to speak, while states would domestically ensure as best they could inclusive pr...

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