The US is discovering what it means to have an isolationist economy

The world's economic policymakers, Ireland's included, are navigating a bewildering and exceptionally misguided change of course by their counterparts in Washington DC. The White House has opted for a set of over-reaching economic policy demarches that are likely to weaken its dominance in economic and financial spheres, as well as damaging the economies of its trading partners, including Ireland. Thanks to the global, open, rules-based system that it has promoted and steered since the second World War, the US economy has been growing much more quickly than Europe's (though distributing the benefits very unequally). But now Donald Trump's administration has…