For almost eight decades – from the end of the Second World War to the second arrival of President Doanld Trump to the White House – the global economic and political systems worked almost flawlessly. The United States helped Britain and its allies win the Second World War. That was in 1945. Had it so wanted, it could have constructed a global economic and political system that it dominated. Instead, advised by the British economist John Maynard Keyenes, it created an international order in which the entire free world participated. Keynes had studied the aftermath of the First World War, fought from 1914 to 1919. The then victors devised the system in which those that were defeated had to pay the victors for part of what they had spent to win the war. Keynes and others who studied the post-First World War order concluded that the rise of Nazis in Europe was a reaction to the way Germany and Italy were treated after they lost on the battlefield. The Second World War victors were not prepared to repeat that mistake. They created a system that distributed power among those who participated in it. The institutions that were founded, including the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank Group, did not concentrate power in the hands of those who operated from Washington.

But Doanld Trump's view of the United States' role in world affairs was driven by different considerations. His focus on what he called Make America Great Again, or MAGA, aimed to have the United States become the dominant global power. This move did not go well with other large economic powers, especially........

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