New Delhi, Feb. 19 -- The global trade order is in crisis as the White House seeks to rebuild the US economy and accomplish its foreign and geopolitical policy goals using tariffs with which it has been pressuring trade partners to accept one-sided deals. The basis of these deals is not mutual benefit; it's capitulation to the unrestrained use of economic heft, strategic leverage and bullying.

No country, apart from China and Canada, has so far offered meaningful resistance to this tearing down of the global trade order. Countries that don't have leverage are trying to deepen trade integration, though, by signing bilateral agreements. The idea is to diversify and protect trade, and thus insure against the twin uncertainties of America's ...