Many blame President-Elect Donald Trump for the rise in protectionism, but the World Trade Organization’s free trade system was under assault long before MAGA hats.

The WTO and its predecessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, were established to reduce tariffs and non-tariff barriers to commerce among market-oriented western democracies and developing countries.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia and China were admitted to the WTO. Western nations assumed that opportunities to improve their economies through trade would encourage them to become democratic and peaceable nations in the manner of post-war Japan and Germany.

Instead, two aggressive states emerged at the center of an Axis of Autocrats—China, Russia, North Korea and Iran—bent on disrupting the U.S.-led liberal world order.

Russia exported oil, natural gas, metals and other commodities to rebuild its economy and military, seize Crimea and invade Ukraine.

China’s mercantilism erodes the foundations of western prosperity by threatening the viability of core manufacturing and technology-intensive activities. It has seized leadership in electric vehicles and green energy equipment.

While the Americans can be charged with starting a trade war, we hardly shot first. Ninety percent of publicly trade companies in China report benefiting from subsidies making its system wholly inconsistent with free trade with western market economies.

Its combination of tariffs, regulatory barriers and various subsidies so frustrated the WTO Dispute Settlement processes that President Barack Obama blocked appointments to the Appellate Body.

Mr. Trump and President Joe Biden continued that policy, wounding the global body’s mechanism for resolving disputes among member governments and its fundamental relevance.

Imports from China have accounted for millions of U.S. manufacturing job losses.

China is anything but peaceful. It threatens to take Taiwan by force, asserts vast territorial claims in the South China Sea and bullies neighbors like Vietnam and the Philippines.

After failing to reach an agreement with China to resolve systemic trade issues that might have resuscitated a WTO-centered system, Mr. Trump levied tariffs on a broad range of Chinese products.

Mr. Biden added tariffs on EVs, lithium-ion batteries and solar panels and launched industrial policies to catch up American manufacturing.

In varying measure, the EU is following suit.

Like Mr. Biden, the Europeans believe they can selectively engage with China on trade and limit decoupling to where it serves their economic and security interests. This would permit the Europeans to preserve a broader context for a WTO-based, multilateral system.

Unfortunately, with the prosperity that enables, China expands its Navy and threatens to drag the Western Pacific and perhaps the whole world into war. As importantly, by answering China’s mercantilism mostly with targeted tariffs and industrial policies, President Biden and Brussels played on Beijing’s home court.

Autocracies can dole out protection and subsidies with only limited accommodation to competing domestic interests. Whereas western governments must cultivate interest groups who can deliver votes and demand shares of the largess.

Hence, we have the pro-union and progressive social agenda elements of Mr. Biden’s automotive semiconductor and other industrial strategies. Those raise costs and will require continuing subsidies beyond the startup subsidies the Chips and Science Act and Inflation Reduction Act provide.

Considering federal budget challenges, Mr. Trump’s prospective 60% tariff on Chinese goods is the lesser of two evils.

Increasingly ASEAN is attracting a great deal of foreign investment, much of it interregional, and becoming an economic bloc that rivals China, India, Japan-South Korea, the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Free Trade Area and EU-UK, under the umbrellas of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership.

The goods exports of just Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia are expected to grow to $2.2 trillion by 2030.

Putting a wall up around America with across the board tariffs as Mr. Trump has proposed would permanently alienate these rapidly emerging economic powerhouses and damage U.S. efforts to build security cooperation in the Pacific to counter Chinese imperial designs.

The United States should impose a comprehensive mechanism that balances bilateral trade with China and redirects commerce to other, mostly Pacific economies.

For example, require licenses to import from China. Those could be issued to exporters in amounts equal to their sales in China to be resold to importers.

Additionally, the United States should create a new multilateral mechanism by rejoining the TPP. Canada, Japan and South Korea are members, and the UK is negotiating membership. This could encourage the EU to abandon its bilateral approach to the region and seek membership, inspire India to join, and together create a WTO without China.

Investors should set their sights on firms that are realigning supply chains and who will also profit from a large regional markets in Southeast Asia. Whatever the mechanism, western decoupling from China are making those nations the locus of global growth the 2nd quarter of this century.

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Peter Morici is an economist and emeritus business professor at the University of Maryland, and a national columnist.