Remind the US of its best creation

BHP Billiton chairman Jac Nasser's reaction might speak for business around the world. There would be "complete trauma", said the former Ford boss this week, if President Donald Trump were to slap a shock 45 per cent tariff on Chinese imports. No multinational boardroom or government since 1945 has needed a playbook for an unpredictable Washington disrupting the global order of free trade and alliances that the US itself created.

Mr Trump seems bent on taking the US into a zero-sum game of nationalist self-interest, where a win for one has to be a loss for another – utterly different from the open world economy of the last 70 years. That culminated in the win-win game of globalisation which the US led as the sole superpower in the 1990s, most successfully in its shepherding of China into the world economy.