Amazon’s distribution center in Phoenix, Arizona, November 2013
Ralph D. Freso / Reuters

More than 75 years after the United States began to build a system of liberal trade to help integrate the world around a vision of peaceful economic cooperation, many of the most vital international systems are failing. Nations are fighting over how to secure vaccines, how to divvy up the production of semiconductors, how to respond to China’s mercantilism and militarism, how to manage technology and information monopolists such as Facebook and Google, and even how to share the metals necessary to build the batteries for electric cars.

One result of these problems has been a surge in calls for

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