By Pankaj Mishra / Bloomberg OpinionAs the year ends, a partial and brief ceasefire seems imminent in US President Donald Trump’s trade dispute with the world. According to the ideological prejudices of the present, built up over nearly four decades of globalization, free trade and deregulation represent the natural order of things. Notwithstanding Britain’s rhetoric, which periodicals such as The Economist amplified, it had arrived at free trade after a successful policy of tariffs. Even Britain, following its settler colonies Australia, Canada and South Africa, came to abandon free trade by 1932. The US moved swiftly to embrace free trade after World War II only because its manufacturing industries, dominant over the world’s war-ravaged economies, needed access to international markets.
