In the middle of the Trump tariff ruckus, I was struck by two contrasting views of the future. On the one hand, Darren Jones, chief secretary to the Treasury, said in an interview that “globalisation is over”. On the other, America’s Universal Studios, with rather ballsy timing, announced a massive investment in a theme park in Bedfordshire, which will generate £50 billion of growth, create 28,000 jobs and attract millions of foreign visitors.

Whatever the gloom-mongers in this country fear and whatever President Trump hopes, globalisation is far from over. The events of the past nine days proved that.

The crash in the market value of US companies — $6.6 trillion in the first two days after Trump’s “liberation day” — was a measure of the value investors place on free trade. The loss in the value of stocks started to spill over into the bond markets, threatening a financial meltdown. Trump caved.

So Trump fought globalisation, and globalisation won. It was inevitable. He needs the support of the rich, the rich want to create more wealth and globalisation is the most powerful wealth-creation tool ever invented. That’s the underlying story of the economy over the past half-century. Trade has risen from a little over a third of world GDP in 1985 to a little less than two thirds now. It has benefited western consumers by reducing what they pay for goods, and western firms by cutting their costs and providing them with new markets. American companies have done particularly well out of it. Their value has increased from about a quarter of the world’s stock markets in the 1980s to nearly two thirds now. But while America’s firms have become more dominant, the country has become less so. That’s because globalisation has lifted billions of Asians out of poverty, thus narrowing the gap between the world’s rich and poor. While America’s real GDP per head has increased by a third since the beginning of the century, China’s has more than quintupled. The narrowing of the income gap between the Chinese and Americans has transformed their countries’ respective clout. While US GDP was five times China’s at the beginning of the century, it’s now less than a third larger. Since greatness is relative, Americans are right to feel that their country isn’t quite as great as it used to be. But as the market crash showed, the impetus to trade is powerful. Over the past two decades, trade has faced the strongest headwinds since the Second World War: the financial crisis, the first-term Trump tariffs, the pandemic, and sanctions after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Yet trade has bounced swiftly back from shocks and found its way round government diktat — which is why sanctions on Russia have proved so ineffective, and why trade remains at about 60 per cent of global GDP, as it was just before the financial crisis.It may be that the US persists in pulling back from the global trading system. There’s clearly sizeable political support for cutting ties with China. It’s not just driven by Trump. Joe Biden retained Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods and handed out subsidies to help American firms against foreign competition. Trump’s pausing of this latest lot of tariffs is, so far, only partial. He has maintained a 125 per cent duty on Chinese goods, which along with a blanket 10 per cent tariff on the rest of the world still represents an average level of 24 per cent, compared with the average before of 2 per cent; and he threatens to reintroduce higher tariffs in 90 days’ time.But barriers to trade will not help to re-establish US dominance. They will, rather, accelerate its decline. That’s because the rest of the world is going in the opposite direction. While America has been raising tariffs, other countries have been bringing them down, so they will get richer. The Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), which needs a little help with its branding, was set up with but then abandoned by the US. The pact, made up of 12 countries including Australia, Canada, Japan, Chile and, since last year, Britain, accounts for 15 per cent of the global economy. Most tariffs between member states have been abolished.China, meanwhile, has been establishing its own free-trading network based on the countries in its neighbourhood, and including Australia and New Zealand. The EU, jolted into action by Trump’s first-term tariffs, has been doing trade deals with other nations — most significantly with Mercosur, a block of Latin American countries. It’s no coincidence that the deal was signed just after Trump was re-elected. Trump’s tariff frenzy has spurred the rest of the world into renewed efforts to promote trade. The New Zealand prime minister suggested a pact between the CPTPP and the EU. Yesterday, Ursula von der Leyen had a chat with him about it, and on the same day China and the EU announced that they have started trade talks.Britain needs to be in the forefront of the renewed impetus to free up trade. We’ve been on the right side of the argument between free traders and mercantilists from 1225 onwards: the Magna Carta promised that “all merchants, unless they have been publicly prohibited beforehand, shall be able to go out of and come into England … free of all evil tolls”. We have a great deal to gain from efforts to bring down barriers further because we are the world’s second largest exporter of services, and non-tariff barriers such as licensing and qualifications requirements remain a big barrier to services trade. So Darren Jones is wrong, and Universal Studios is right. Despite the rollercoaster ride of the past few days, the smart money is on a globalised future.