At flabbergasting speed, we currently see a very unappetising authoritarian turn in the United States under President Donald Trump. Numerous executive orders, often on questionable legal basis, target international cooperation and funding for academia, which, in the mind of “strongmen”, merit little attention, anyways. Most importantly, though, these decrees target the state’s capabilities to operate…
Globalisation in the sense of increasing global connectedness has seen difficult times over the last years. The global financial crisis showed the vulnerability of our economic systems and middle classes. Multilateralism was challenged by “my country first” movements, not least so from the US, one of the godmother nations to the post-WWII world order. The other godmother, the UK, turned its back to the EU’s integration project. Furthermore, trade wars increased trade barriers and changed the setting for global production chains. And certainly in 2020, a global pandemic was (and is) most effectively curbed by the limitation of individual movements, often reducing cross-border linkages.
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The Group of Twenty (G20) Osaka Summit was relatively successfully, with progress on important policy issues, despite the awkward compromises on climate and trade. It might be remembered for its striking similarities with the preceding Buenos Aires G20 Summit. The unusually short, seven-month gap between the two summits left the core agenda largely unchanged, partly reflecting the broad continuities in world politics.
Since the US created the post-World War Two liberal international order and is still the pre-eminent global power notwithstanding the growing Chinese challenge, it is uniquely placed to determine the trade and investment system’s fortunes. The answer to the question posed in the title, therefore, depends fundamentally on the medium-term trajectory of US politics, and the resultant US position in the world. Accordingly, in this blog I put forward my analysis of where the US political system is headed under President Donald J. Trump, how key countries are responding, and the ensuing implications for the global trade and investment system.
At the recent G7 energy ministerial in Rome, the Trump administration’s listlessness on climate change prevented attendees from being able to sign off on an endorsement of the Paris climate deal. With the G7 leaders summit in Taormina now only one month away, and the G20 leaders summit in Hamburg only two months after that, it seems Donald Trump is yet to be won over by those in his cabinet who believe it would be a mistake for an American President to attend both summits as the first world leader to cut and run from the Paris Agreement.
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