Britain should seize its chance to redefine global trade and strengthen new alliances

Liberation Day" was, of course, a tragic idiocy based on a bewildering inversion of reality.

- Will Hutton

The rest of the world has not been ripping off or pillaging and plundering the US, as claimed by Trump launching his salvo of tariffs, the highest for a century. The truth is the opposite.

There is no American "national emergency". The US still represents the same 25% of world GDP, as it did in 1980. More than half the goods it imports are from affiliates of US multinationals denominated and paid for in dollars, so its deficit is an accounting identity with itself rather than reflecting economic weakness.

The richest and most dynamic economy in the world has profited hugely from a global growth-promoting economic order that it created one of rules-based open trade in goods and services undertaken in dollars. Its fake deficit in goods belies an economic strength that permits the US to be the world's number one exporter of services in banking, consultancy, media and IT. This American wealth generation machine has been so aggressive in pursuing its self-interest that when taken to the limits - as in its relationship with the UK - its partners become de facto vassal states. Britain has not been pillaging the cream of US tech companies; rather, it has been stripped of its tech jewels by the US.

Even so, the rest of the world has benefited, with Asia in particular bootstrapping itself from poverty. Certainly, there are American rust belt, manufacturing towns that have done badly - their working-class inhabitants left beached, their interests unprotected by enfeebled trade unions. But the rest of the US prospered, although the country is pockmarked by gross inequalities.