Who will fight for free trade now?

“It’s not clear how you fight very probably illegal US tariffs on aluminium and steel,” says Jeremy Warner – but it “makes little sense” to start with a direct tit-for-tat response. The European Commission president, Jean-claude Juncker, should know that trade wars “always end in mutual destruction”. By threatening to retaliate, he has “beaten Donald Trump by a nose in the stupidity stakes”. Still, Britain hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory either. How can it be acceptable for a supposed champion of rules-based international trade to seek its own “carve-out” from the new tariffs? If we do that, “we might as well kiss goodbye to the World Trade Organisation”, and prepare for “a semi-corrupt era of kowtowing and back-room deals”. Trump’s main criteria for judging whether trade is unfair is not based on what barriers exist, but whether the other nation has a surplus. That should ring warning bells in Whitehall, given that Britain currently enjoys “a substantial trade surplus with the US”. Ally or not, Trump will be “determined to correct this position in forthcoming trade talks”.