The idea that economic openness and trade could “foster peace and stability reigned supreme” for decades, said law and economics professor Armin Steinbach on The Conversation.

But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “shattered this way of thinking”. New free trade agreements are far less frequent, while “protectionist measures have proliferated”.

And this week Donald Trump announced the biggest break in US trade policy in more than a century. The president’s universal baseline tariff of 10% on all imported goods to the US, and much higher “reciprocal” rates for nations perceived to have harmed America with their trade deficits, increased the US’s effective tariff rate to its highest in more than 100 years.

“Not since the disastrous Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930, which deepened the Great Depression, has America resorted to such self-defeating fortress economics,” said The Times. But the tariffs threaten damage “far beyond her shores“.

What did the commentators say?

Trump’s so-called “Liberation Day” – a “catalogue of foolishness” fuelled by his “delusions” – heralds the US’s “total abandonment of the world trading order and embrace of protectionism”, said The Economist. Now, the question for countries “reeling from the president’s mindless vandalism” is how to “limit the damage”.

The EU has already threatened reciprocal tariffs. But trade barriers “harm those who put them up”, and are more likely to cause Trump to “double down than retreat”. They could make things worse – “possibly catastrophically so”: a spiralling tit-for-tat trade war. Instead, governments should “focus on increasing trade flows among themselves”.

America does not dominate trade: its share of global demand for imports is only 15%. The EU, the 12 members of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), South Korea, and small open economies like Norway, account for 34%. The EU should “overcome its aversion to big trade pacts and sign up to the CPTPP”.

But last night Trump said he would come after the EU and Canada (a CPTPP member) with “far larger” tariffs if they worked together. This opened “a new front in the unfolding trade war”, said The New York Times. The US is “by far” Europe’s biggest trading partner and the prospect of even more tariffs left the EU “scrambling to negotiate”. That said, the fact that the Trump administration has shown “little appetite to strike a deal so far” has left Europeans with no choice but to seek “new alliances and deepen existing trading relationships”.

The US is also “far and away” Canada’s biggest export market, said Jay Goldberg in the Toronto Sun. Canada needs “a new economic plan” – and quickly. One idea, long talked about, is a free-movement, free-trade zone between Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK: “CANZUK”.

All these “like-minded” countries would “benefit from closer economic cooperation”, given their “historic ties” as members of the Commonwealth and their common language. CANZUK would “offer jet fuel to help turbocharge economic growth at a time when all four countries, and particularly Canada, badly need it”.

In a sense, Trump has already “achieved his first global peace deal”, said Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in The Telegraph. “China, Japan and South Korea have kissed and made up after years of trade quarrels.”

The three nations’ trade ministers met last week for the first economic discussions since 2019 and agreed to “cooperate closely”. They held hands in a “collective gesture of Asian defiance”, and agreed to work towards a future free trade deal and “flesh out the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership”: on paper, the world’s largest trade pact.

China also “launched a charm offensive to woo European officials”, suggesting the two blocs team up against Trump. A possible Sino-European trade truce was “unthinkable just weeks ago”, with “daggers drawn” over EU tariffs on Chinese EVs. “But they both have a bigger wolf to contend with today.”

What next?

Ultimately, the “golden age of global free trade” is over – but that doesn’t spell disaster, said Steinbach on The Conversation. In a world of geopolitical conflict, security concerns, not liberalisation, are reshaping trade policy. This requires “shifting away from fragile multilateralism towards more selective, regional alliances”. The EU’s strengthening ties with South America’s Mercosur bloc, a group of countries “reliant on open trade”, exemplify this approach.

The EU-Mercosur deal, agreed in December after 20 years of negotiations, aims to create “one of the largest free trade zones in the world”, said Al Jazeera, comprising more than 700 million people and “nearly 25% of global gross domestic product”.

France was leading a group of EU states objecting to the deal, amid widespread opposition from European farmers. But in light of Trump’s tariffs, France today organised a meeting to discuss the deal. “In the current geopolitical context, all participants agree on how important it is to diversify trade partnerships,” a spokesperson for Benjamin Haddad, France’s minister for Europe, told Reuters.

There is no “avoiding the havoc” Trump has created, said The Economist – but that does not mean his “foolishness” will triumph.

Find out how closely you’ve been paying attention to the latest news and other global events by putting your knowledge to the test with our Quiz of The Week.

And don’t forget, to get all the news that matters delivered to your inbox every day, sign up for our new daily digital editions: US readers can find out more here, and here if you’re a reader in the UK.

1. Which African country was the unexpected recipient of the toughest of the US tariffs unveiled this week?

• Angola
• Mozambique
• Lesotho
• Djibouti

2. An Isar Aerospace Spectrum rocket launched from where before crashing into the sea?

• Norway
• Germany
• Sweden
• Poland

3. France’s far-right presidential hopeful Marine Le Pen has been barred from running for political office for how many years?

• 3
• 5
• 7
• 10

4. How many hours did US Senator Cory Booker speak in making the longest speech in Senate history?

• 10
• 17
• 21
• 25

5. The story of which band will be released as a “bingeable” multi-movie experience in April 2028?

• Fleetwood Mac
• The Beatles
• ABBA
• Queen

6. Which vaccine has been found to help reduce the chances of developing Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia?

• Shingles
• Flu
• Tetanus
• Hepatitis B

7. How many men have been called up in the Russian military’s latest draft?

• 40,000
• 90,000
• 160,000
• 210,000

8. A country home associated with which author is to be demolished despite a battle to save it?

• William Shakespeare
• Virginia Woolf
• Jane Austen
• Emily Dickinson

9. A Looney Tunes movie starring which character is to be released a year after being shelved by Warner Bros?

• Speedy Gonzalez
• Wile E. Coyote
• Bugs Bunny
• Pepé Le Pew

10. A woman with the world’s longest tongue has shown off her skills by using it to play what game?

• Jenga
• Connect 4
• Chess
• Scrabble

1. Lesotho

Goods from the mountainous kingdom, home to a little over two million people, were hit with a 50% tariff – higher than those imposed on China, India and the EU. Lesotho’s most profitable exports are diamonds and clothing, with the US its largest trading partner after South Africa.

2. Norway

German company Isar Aerospace launched its Spectrum orbital rocket from a Norwegian spaceport, but the rocket crashed and exploded 30 seconds after lift-off. The company aims to build a commercial space industry and said the crash allowed it to “gather a substantial amount of flight data and experience to apply on future missions”.

3. 5

Le Pen, whose National Rally party is currently leading in voter intention polls, had already announced her plans to run in France’s 2027 presidential election when a Paris court handed down the sentence. She intends to appeal against the verdict, which found Le Pen and party colleagues guilty of misusing European Parliament funds.

4. 25

The senator, who was protesting President Donald Trump’s hardline policies, spoke for 25 hours and 5 minutes. The previous record of 24 hours and 18 minutes was set by Strom Thurmond during his filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1957. During Booker’s speech, he did not eat, sit or go to the bathroom.

5. The Beatles

Paul Mescal, Joseph Quinn, Barry Keoghan and Harris Dickinson have been unveiled as the stars of the four-movie Beatles biopic, with each instalment telling the life of a different band member. Not everyone is convinced that cinemas need to join the bingeing culture. Are we “supposed to sit through them all back-to-back like people do for ‘The Lord of the Rings'”, asked Fran Hoepfner on Vulture.

6. Shingles

A study published in Nature found that those vaccinated with an older live-virus vaccine, like Zostavax, were 20% less likely to develop dementia within seven years compared to those unvaccinated. The findings were based on the health records of 280,000 people in Wales.

7. 160,000

Military service in Russia is mandatory for men aged 18-30, with call-ups issued twice a year – but this round of conscription is the largest since 2011. The size of the draft has stoked speculation that Moscow is looking to bolster its depleted forces in Ukraine, but the country’s defence ministry maintains that no conscripts will be sent into combat.

8. Jane Austen

UK planning authorities have approved the demolition of Ashe Park House near Basingstoke. The novelist was born a mile from the Hampshire country house and attended balls there in the 1790s, mentioning the estate several times in her letters.

9. Wile E. Coyote

Live-action/animation hybrid “Coyote vs. Acme” sees Wile E. Coyote’s attempt to sue the fictional manufacturer over his failed efforts to ensnare the Roadrunner. The movie – which cost $72 million to make – was shelved by Warner Bros last year as a tax write-off, but has now been bought by distributor Ketchup Entertainment. Listen to this week’s episode of The Week Unwrapped to find out how movies fall victim to “Hollywood accounting”.

10. Jenga

Chanel Tapper, 34, set a record for having the longest tongue, measuring 3.8 inches. In a video for Guinness World Records, she also showcases her tongue’s unique talents by flipping a plastic cup.

Could young people lead a religious revival? What has Facebook done to anger writers? And why would studios block the release of their own movies? Olly Mann and The Week delve behind the headlines and debate what really matters from the past seven days.

A podcast for curious, open-minded people, The Week Unwrapped delivers fresh perspectives on politics, culture, technology and business.

It makes for a lively, enlightening discussion, ranging from the serious to the offbeat. Previous topics have included whether solar engineering could refreeze the Arctic, why funerals are going out of fashion, and what kind of art you can use to pay your tax bill.

You can subscribe to The Week Unwrapped wherever you get your podcasts:

• Spotify
• Apple Podcasts
• Global Player

Joshua Oppenheimer’s film is billed as a “post-apocalyptic musical” with a “bold vision”, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator. Now, I am all for “bold visions”, but maybe not if they have no plot and run for two and a half hours (I really feared “The End” might never end).

‘Comically bad’

Set two decades after a species-obliterating environmental catastrophe, it follows the lives of an ultra-privileged trio who have taken refuge in an “exquisitely decorated” subterranean bunker: a former oil tycoon (Michael Shannon), who spends his days drafting a self-exculpatory autobiography; his wife (Tilda Swinton), a former ballerina who claims to have performed with the Bolshoi; and their son (George MacKay), who has never known life beyond the walls of their sanctuary, and entertains himself by building models of what life might be like outside it.

They are cared for by various servants and spend their days in idle luxury, occasionally performing musical numbers – but not very competently: one dance scene is “so comically bad that I only hope (and pray) that it was intentional”.

‘Sharp as sushi knives’

The action “jolts forward” when an outsider (Moses Ingram) somehow enters the bunker, said Danny Leigh in the Financial Times. The cast – MacKay in particular – are “sharp as sushi knives” and it all looks superb.

But sadly “The End” is not the “uncompromising masterpiece” it aspires to be, said Wendy Ide in The Observer. Oppenheimer’s decision to frame a “story of guilt, grief, eco-disaster and the unimaginable cost of privilege” as a musical falls flat: put simply, its songs “just aren’t very good”. And though the film has moments of brilliance, it is too long and “catastrophically self-indulgent”. What is really “frustrating”, however, is just “how close it comes to greatness”.

The award-winning food writer chooses the books that have most affected her. Her audiobook, “Around the Table, 52 Essays on Food and Life” is on Audible and Spotify now, and published by Mitchell Beazley in October.

Revolutionary Road

Richard Yates, 1961
I would need to live several lives before I’d have the insight to write this. A collapsing marriage – the resentment, the longing for more, the imagined conversations – and the shattering of the American Dream in 1950s suburbia. This shook my soul.

Foster

Claire Keegan, 2010
Claire Keegan’s writing is spare, small scale. She leads you into what you think is a small world – a young girl is taken to stay with a childless couple while her mother has another baby – but it’s a huge world where love brings hope and disappointments are made bearable. A perfect novel.

A Thousand Acres

Jane Smiley, 1991
Sisters in Iowa fight over the inheritance of their father’s farm when he decides to retire. A brutal story about what families are capable of, with more than an echo of “King Lear”. I read it in one sitting.

Say Nothing

Patrick Radden Keefe, 2018
An account of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, with the actions of IRA volunteer Dolours Price (she tried to blow up the Old Bailey) and the kidnap and murder of mother Jean McConville at its centre. The structure of such a complex narrative is breathtaking, as is the way Radden Keefe inhabits the minds of those involved. I grew up in the Troubles and could almost smell the Northern Irish countryside.

A Well-Seasoned Appetite

Molly O’Neill, 1995
Molly O’Neill writes about food better than anyone else. It’s not her recipes but her prose. A granita is a “shale of glassy crystals”, and her first taste of aubergines is like a short story: she eats the smoky flesh while listening to the local radio station and news of Watergate.

Wild horses have become a new and unlikely defence against bush fires in the Iberian Highlands.

Recent summers have brought a rampage of wildfires to Europe but with the hottest months approaching again, ecologists hope that horses could play a significant role in reducing the risk.

Horses for gorse 

In 2023, the conservation group Rewilding Spain introduced a herd of 10 horses to the Iberian Highlands. The rare horses, known as Przewalski’s, went extinct in the wild but were successfully reintroduced from European zoos.

The horses now roam around more than 5,700 hectares of public forest, reducing the volume of combustible vegetation in the landscape.

They feed on the yellow flowers of gorse – a highly combustible plant. By “selectively clearing” it, the horses “help prevent wildfires”, said Laura Lagos, a researcher at the University of A Coruna, whose 2021 study found that wild horse grazing was the most effective method for preventing wildfires.

Other animals, including sheep and bison, can also help reduce wildfire risks through grazing, but wild horses are uniquely adapted to Galicia’s rugged terrain and they have “moustaches that appear designed to protect their lips from the prickly gorse”, Lagos told Al Jazeera.

Although the equine dectet won’t change everything on their own, the Rewilding Spain team leader Pablo Schapira told Positive News that 10 is “a good number to start a new population” and he’s “looking forward to seeing how the animals interact with the larger landscape”.

Roaming history

For centuries, the Serrano horse was used for “threshing and other agricultural jobs”, but “allowed to roam freely when not working”, says Positive News.

But the history of wild horses in Galicia “dates back thousands of years” and rock carvings of horses being hunted by humans “suggest their presence in the region during the Neolithic period”, said Al Jazeera.

In the 1970s, about 22,000 wild horses “roamed the region’s mountains, forests and heathlands”, and the “growing risks” of climate change, habitat loss and “declining herd numbers” show the “urgent need” to protect both the horses and the ecosystems they sustain.

Meanwhile, bison, which have “indiscriminate eating habits”, consume over 130 different plant species, “effectively clearing and rejuvenating the landscape” and helping to “prevent the undergrowth from becoming a potential fire hazard”, said Euronews.

This week’s question: Researchers have discovered that funnel-web spiders from busy urban areas can weave soundproof webs, allowing them to eat their prey in peace. If a company were to manufacture a scaled-up funnel web for noise phobic humans, what name should it give the product?

Click here to see the results of last week’s contest: Marriage pounds

How to enter: Submissions should be emailed to contest@theweek.com. Please include your name, address and daytime telephone number for verification; this week, please type “Soundproof web” in the subject line. Entries are due by noon, Eastern Time, Tuesday, April 8. Winners will appear on the Puzzle Page of the April 18 issue and at theweek.com/contest on April 11. In the case of identical or similar entries, the first one received gets credit. All entries become property of The Week.

The winner gets a one-year subscription to The Week.

Medford, Oregon

Casa de la Nueva Vida, a 2022 four-bedroom in southeast Oregon’s Rogue Valley, has a kitchen with an azure BlueStar range, a marble island, and a walnut breakfast bar. The living room includes a floor-to-ceiling wood-burning fireplace and connects to a balcony with views of the Siskiyou Mountains.

The 2.14-acre lot holds a guesthouse, studio, greenhouse, pool, sauna, and cooking cabana. $7,900,000. Kendra Ratcliff, LUXE | Forbes Global Properties, (503) 330-6677.

Oak Bay, British Columbia

This 2023 Arts & Crafts–style five-bedroom in Victoria on Vancouver Island features an open kitchen with an arched entry, coffered ceilings, gold-tone hardware, a La Cornue range set, two islands, and a window-lined dining area.

The living room has a tapered fireplace, herringbone floors, and accordion doors that open to a deck canopied by Garry oaks. Beaches and shops are less than 10 minutes away. $3,900,000. Jason Binab, The Agency, (778) 265-5552.

Park City, Utah

The kitchen in this 1995 mid-century modern–inspired five-bedroom by architect Eduard Dreier features a 48-inch Dacor range, two sinks, two islands—one for prep, one for dining—and a bar with a beverage fridge, plus a 400-bottle wine display downstairs.

Out on the deck are a hot tub and an alfresco dining space with ski-run views. Trailheads, historic Main Street, and resorts are a short drive away. $7,800,000. Negar Chevre-Shams, Summit Sotheby’s International Realty, (760) 238-0438.

Shelter Island, New York

This 1901 waterfront Tudor has a kitchen with a stove nook, farmhouse apron sink, glass-fronted cabinets, and a new butler’s pantry. Restored and updated, the six-bedroom features leaded glass windows, a formal dining room, a sunroom, and six fireplaces.

The 2-acre property includes a pool and hot tub, a brick patio, mature trees, and a deepwater dock. $7,950,000. Linda McCarthy, Daniel Gale Sotheby’s International Realty, (631) 745-2626.

Charleston, South Carolina

The renovated kitchen in this 1992 four-bedroom features patterned tiling, a La Cornue stove, a Sub-Zero fridge, and a separate beverage sink. The kitchen opens to a dining room with a checkerboard floor, connecting to a vaulted living room.

The lot, on Shem Creek in Old Village, includes a pool and spa, fireplace, and dock with two slips. $6,295,000. Lyles Geer, William Means Real Estate, (843) 793-9800.

Detroit, Michigan

Part of a new community in East Village, this three-bedroom, 2024 Craftsman has an open kitchen with KitchenAid stainless steel appliances, green maple cabinets, a quartz backsplash, and an oversize island.

The main floor is filled out with a dining nook, living room, mudroom, laundry, and the primary en suite bedroom. Dining and shopping are walkable, and Belle Isle State Park is less than 10 minutes by car. $459,000. Nika Jusufi, Nika & Co, (313) 858-6580.