By comparison, Trump's attempts to restore “balance” in US trade by levying tariffs on imports from key trading partners appear crude, inward-looking and autocratic. However, the global trade system was in trouble even before the US president weighed in.

Watch: BMW feels the impact of US-China trade war

Increasing trade within and between regional blocs has also come at the cost of unemployment for certain groups of workers in advanced economies, thus contributing to income inequality and social stresses. In turn, this is helping to foster popular resentment against free markets.

Trump came to office in the US largely because he recognised and exploited this fact. Populist politicians elsewhere may ride to power on his coattails, and simply deploring this fact or rushing to create new trade blocs as counters to Trumpian protectionism will not solve the problem.

There are wider Asian free trade schemes planned too, and these form only part of a growing spider's web of such accords globally. Within these networks are complex and often conflicting “rules of origin” governing tariff treatment of goods exchanged among members.

It is a “dog's breakfast” of overlapping accords, a system that is costly for business and which can interfere with the working of supply chains so that suppliers from countries that have comparative advantage based on cost are disadvantaged by a political choice of trading partners.

What is needed is some rationalisation of this largely ungoverned process if the forces of dissatisfaction driving populism and trade protectionism are not to become even more powerful and disruptive. There is a need for a more holistic approach if globalisation is to have any meaning.

For decades after the post-second world war period, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade or GATT (now subsumed in the World Trade Organisation) sought to further world trade through a series of globally negotiated trade “rounds”, but this ended with the failure of the Doha Round a decade ago.

One reason why the Doha process failed (apart from the fact that it attempted to address sensitive areas of trade such as agriculture and services) was because of the complexity of dealing with the wider problems that go with free trade, including service sector transactions.

Watch: US soybean farmers hope for an early end to trade war

Instead of grappling with these problems at the time, a number of advanced economies opted to walk away from the multilateral process and focus instead on bilateral and regional free trade and investment agreements that were billed as “building blocks” for global free trade.

The building blocks are of such varying design, however, that they cannot easily form part of a global free trade architecture. Regional trading accords were seen as an easy way out and were not designed with a truly global trade and investment architecture in mind.

Only a return to the multilateral approach can solve the problems of the global trade order. This means looking at trade in the broadest possible – economic, monetary and political – context at the national and global levels. The system needs a thorough overhaul and not simply a quick “fix”.

Anthony Rowley is a veteran journalist specialising in Asian economic and financial affairs