Joe Biden and Donald Trump agree on tariffs against China. The world has lost its biggest cheerleader for globalisation

The biggest shift in American politics has nothing to do with Stormy Daniels or Michael Cohen, Fox News or golf courses. Indeed, its author is not Donald J Trump. Yet the implications stretch far beyond this year’s presidential elections, and affect countries across the world. The era of free trade is dying, and the man bringing down the guillotine represents the party that in the past three decades has been evangelically pro-globalisation: the Democrats.

Last week, Joe Biden imposed tariffs on a range of Chinese-made goods. Electric cars produced in China will now be hit with import tax of 100%, chips and solar cells 50% and lithium-ion batteries 25%. These and other tariffs on goods worth an estimated $18bn a year amount to a rounding error in the giant US economy. And in an election year, Mr Biden, who hails from Scranton, Pennsylvania, is fretting about support not only in his home state but across the country’s industrial heartland, gutted by decades of free trade.

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Protectionism in the form of tariffs is justified but the focus will be on whether Beijing retaliates

The global economy is fragmenting and a new era of protectionism has dawned. Dreams by free marketeers of a frictionless world in which goods and services moved seamlessly from country to country are dead.

That was the clear message from Joe Biden’s decision last week to target China with a range of new, much higher tariffs on electric vehicles and a range of other products crucial to sectors seen by the White House as vital to the future health of the US economy and to national security.