It’s easy to dismiss Donald Trump’s haphazard tariff barrage as silly and self-defeating, especially after so many days of global market turmoil. But critics among liberal Democrats and Republican free traders still need to address the overriding goal behind the seeming madness. The key strategic objective of Trump’s approach is simple: restoring American industrial power. Opponents of the US president ignore this at their peril.

It is true that the American economy continues to outperform those of Europe and the UK, especially in terms of tech, communications and finance. Yet the situation for blue-collar professions and working-class communities has not improved with the pace of globalisation. Between 2004 and 2017, the US share of world manufacturing shrank from 15 to 10 per cent. Since 2000, notes an Economic Policy Institute study, China’s export barrage has cost as many as 3.7million US jobs.

The ‘China shock’ is not just an American but a global phenomenon. Today, China boasts nearly as many factory exports as the US, Japan and Germany combined. Overall, Europe’s industrial sector continues to decline, losing 850,000 manufacturing jobs between 2019 and 2024. Germany could lose around half of its 800,000 auto jobs to Chinese competition by 2030.

To be sure, the early stages of globalisation reaped enormous benefits, both for Western consumers and for developing countries. But China’s admission into the World Trade Organisation in 2000 changed the dynamic. Here was a huge country, with enormous human capital, which adopted a highly mercantilist drive to dominate industries, first at the lower end of manufacturing and then, increasingly, in the most sophisticated sectors.