President Barack Obama infamously killed the multilateral Doha Round last December by instructing his representative at the World Trade Organisation to be a “rejectionist” negotiator. He compounded the folly by instead floating the trans-Pacific Trade Initiative that is conceived in a spirit of confronting China rather than promoting trade, and is also a cynical surrender to self-seeking Washington lobbies that would have made John Kenneth Galbraith blush. Not content with these body blows to the world trading system, which his predecessors had built up over decades of US leadership, Mr Obama pulled off the remarkable feat of making things yet worse with his State of the Union address.

In particular, he decried outsourcing: “We will not go back to an economy weakened by outsourcing.” He also celebrated manufacturers: “Tonight, I want to speak about?.?.?.?an economy that’s built to last?.?.?.?an economy built on manufacturing.” Both are costly fallacies that deserve no quarter from our leadership. They hurt the US economy; they also guarantee that the US will undermine further the world trading system.

Outsourcing is a bogeyman. The deception that Mr Obama buys into goes back to the populist commentator Lou Dobbs, who denounced the firms that bought components from abroad as Benedict Arnolds – the rogue who became a byword for treachery when he changed sides during the American war for independence.