In The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama’s book, there is a passage in which the president-elect recounts a conversation about globalisation with Robert Rubin, Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton and an ardent free trader.

“It was hard to deny Rubin’s basic insight,” he wrote. “We can try to slow globalisation, but we can’t stop it. The US economy is now so integrated with the rest of the world ... that it’s even hard to imagine, much less [to] enforce, an effective regime of protectionism.”