India, April 4 -- President Donald Trump's announcements of reciprocal tariffs on the US's trading partners, unless reversed, will inflict a massive blow to globalisation as we know it. The US, as Trump's executive order announcing tariffs notes, was the vanguard of trade liberalisation in the world and led the efforts to establish a multilateral trade regime, first under the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) and then the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

The positive impact this multilateral trading regime had on global trade is unambiguously clear. Data from the World Bank shows that trade-GDP ratio for the world economy increased almost consistently between 1970 and 2008, with this number more than doubling from around 25% t...