Nobody benefits from a shoot-em-up trade war but it's the little guys, like Canada, who are most likely to get hurt in the crossfire

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After the dry, desperate beggar-thy-neighbour days of the 1930s and the fight-to-the-death shooting wars of the 1940s, common folk — farmers, schoolmarms, preachers, ink-stained wretches, everybody — all came to understand the world needed a sheriff to keep the peace in international trade. It got one in the form of the United States, then producer of half the planet’s GDP. The U.S. and 22 other countries got together in peaceful places in Europe — Geneva, Switzerland; Annecy, France; Torquay, England — and hammered together new laws for world trade: a General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Four decades later, the 23, since joined by 100 more countries, institutionalized it all in a new World Trade Organization (WTO), with more ambitious rules reflecting the recent triumph of capitalism, or at least quasi-capitalism, over communism. The rule of GATT/WTO laws thus kept the peace for half a century.

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But now the world’s trade sheriff produces only a quarter of global GDP, and a rival, China, threatens its supremacy — even if the average Chinese still earns only $24,380 a year, compared with the average American’s $82,190, and our own $60,700, all........

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