Importing US goods was once considered politically necessary. In 1978, the East Germany leader Erich Honecker placed an order for one million pairs of Levi’s. The stern communist had accepted the inevitable: that his country’s citizens would do anything to get their hands on a pair of the jeans. Across the world, US brands represented freedom and trendiness. When McDonald’s opened its first restaurant in the Soviet Union in 1990, tens of thousands of people joined the queue in icy weather.