After the end of World War II, everyone assumed that Hamiltonian economic policy was the default among nations.  The negotiators at Bretton Woods and other economic conferences wrote new rules around it, and baked tariffs and trade measures into the post-war international economic order.  That makes sense, because all major nations used tariffs and industrial policy to support their economic development.   The question for the international trading system, to quote Friedrich List from back

The Fed should re-examine its great mistakes that led to the great inflation. It should abandon the dogma that inflation is caused when the economy grows too much and workers get paid too much. Inflation is caused when government spends too much and prints too much. Money on Wall Street is too easy, and credit on Main Street is too tight. The Fed’s bloated balance sheet, designed to support the biggest firms in a bygone

This talk about Europe’s ability to wield its holdings of US Treasuries as a political tool is as divorced from reality as the talk about China’s ability to wield its holdings of US Treasuries as a political tool.  For all the huffing and puffing, Chinese holdings of US assets actually increased. This shouldn’t have been a surprise. If you run massive trade surpluses, you have no choice but to acquire foreign assets, and if you