They could take advantage of Trump’s challenge to the global trading system and revive the proposal for an international trade organisation that is more efficient,  more advanced and more equitable.During the late 1990s, a small group of developing countries, led by India, Pakistan, Egypt and Cuba, organised a concerted resistance to the Western juggernaut in the WTO.US President Donald Trump’s unilateral tariffs on steel and aluminium imports threaten to unleash a trade war with America’s friends and foes.After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Gatt was transformed into the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the Washington Consensus was imposed with a vengeance.As Deng Tsiao Ping remarked at the outset of China’s rise: "Development is the only truth.The system was unfair at multiple levels. The US Congress withdrew support because the protections provided to American corporations against "expropriation" of investments were not considered strong enough.

Textile trade was restricted by small import and export quotas.Emerging from the Second World War as the dominant economic power, the US propagated the thesis that "nations can advance only by eliminating barriers to the free movement of goods and capital and by minimising the role of government in the economy". It became the driving force for globalisation.Of the three institutions proposed by British economist Lord Keynes for the reconstruction of the world economy after the Second World War, the IMF and the World Bank were created at Bretton Woods. After its entry into the WTO, China took advantage of the WTO’s "free-trade" regime China Fuel filter OEM Factory to beat the industrialised countries at their own game, emerging as the world’s manufacturing hub and accumulating huge trade surpluses and reserves. Almost all the tools used by the industrial world to "climb the ladder" of industrial development were "kicked away" under the WTO agreement.Thereafter, the world trading system developed unequally. Losing the game in the WTO, the developed countries have moved to pursue plurilateral and bilateral "free-trade" agreements. They blocked one-sided decisions at the WTO’s Singapore and Seattle ministerial meetings and were successful in inserting a modest "development agenda" in the 2000 Doha Ministerial Declaration, which changed the nature and dynamics of global trade. Tariffs on other goods were lowered uniformly despite the inherent economic disparity between nations. Europe’s revival was fostered by US aid and trade under the Marshall Plan. Agriculture was excluded from free-trade principles; the US and EU maintained their agricultural subsidies, while the developing countries were not allowed to do so."By arrangement with Dawn.

Although Trump ignorantly denounced the TPP, he may rejoin if the 11 "partners", who have revived it, accommodate his demands, which appears likely.Similarly, the trade tensions with US allies generated by Trump’s steel and aluminium tariffs are likely to be resolved through cosmetic concessions.The interests of the developing countries would be best served if they are able to act collectively. Other countries were asked to adhere to the "free-trade" principles of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (Gatt).  Today, the developing countries possess the collective economic and political power to construct a trading system that serves development.However, history indicates a contrary conclusion: that industrial development has been achieved almost always behind the walls of state protection and intervention.The much-advertised 12-member Trans Pacific Partnership, apart from seeking to exclude China, sought to introduce new "standards" favouring the industrialised countries. The third, the International Trade Organisation, endorsed in the 1946 Havana Charter, was stillborn. Japan, Korea and Taiwan industrialised behind protective barriers and because of the "one-way" access offered them to the US market, capital and technology. The focus of future trade friction will be China. The move may appease Trump’s "rust belt" constituency but is unlikely to end America’s trade deficits or bring back manufacturing jobs. If we don’t develop, we will be bullied. Besides goods, free-trade principles encompassed services, finance, intellectual property and industrial policy. Simultaneously, the US and the European Union endured their worst financial and economic crisis since the 1929 Great Depression.