President Trump’s new National Security Strategy argues that the U.S. must compete in a hostile world. Yet the White House also wants to retreat behind trade barriers. The Trump administration has stacked up a pile of trade cases that will come tumbling down early in 2018. More important than any specific case is the signal of a strategy of economic defeatism.

After seven years of extraordinary governmental stimulus, the world needs a shift from exceptional monetary policies to private sector-led growth. The US Federal Reserve’s increase in interest rates sounded the clarion call. China’s market tribulations highlight deepening global uncertainties and the need for new approaches. Three possible ways to generate growth stand out for 2016.

President Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington this month could be as consequential for the world economy as then-vice premier Deng Xiaoping’s American tour of 1979.

The Obama administration’s negative response to China’s proposed Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank was a strategic mistake. Though some Chinese moves might be destabilising and require US resistance, this initiative should have been welcomed.

The US should be careful about opposing ventures that are popular and likely to proceed. Losing fights does not build confidence. Moreover, the new bank’s purpose — to develop infrastructure in Asia — is a good goal. The world economy needs more growth. Many emerging markets are eager to boost productivity and growth by lowering costs of transportation, improving energy availability, enhancing communications networks, and distributing clean water.

The AIIB offers an opportunity to strengthen the very international economic system that the US created and sustained. The AIIB’s designated leader, Jin Liqun, a former vice-president of the Asian Development Bank, sought advice in Washington. He engaged an American lawyer who was the World Bank’s leading specialist on governance. He also reached out to another American who had served as World Bank country director for China and then worked with the US embassy.

If the AIIB was indeed threatening the American-led multilateral economic order, as its opponents seemed to believe, then its Chinese founders chose a curiously open and co-operative way of doing so.

Robert B. Zoellick, outgoing president of the World Bank, will join Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs in July as a senior fellow.  Zoellick, whose five-year term at the Bank ends June 30, is a former Belfer Center research fellow and an alumnus of the Kennedy School. He has also been named a distinguished visiting fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C.