If Joe Biden wins the US presidential election in November, the temptation will be to see Donald Trump’s years in the White House as a temporary aberration from American engagement with the world and its willingness to uphold a rules-based liberal economic order. Not only does Joe Biden embody an older, more collaborative US outlook, he has even put climate change — a top concern for liberal multilateralists — at the centre of his campaign.
A victory for Mr Trump’s Democratic rival may well restore rules-based globalisation as the default mode of international economic interaction. But it will look very different from the globalisation of the 1990s. Even if the US recommits to a rules-based order, the conflict over what the rules should be will become much fiercer.
Both Mr Trump’s trade war and the immediate impulse from the pandemic have been about repatriating production. Post-Trump, the fight will shift from where production is located to how it is carried out. Welcome to the new trade policy: trade promotion, but in the service of extending the regulatory reach of the three blocs who set the rules — the US, the EU and China.