Despite an increase in free trade agreements outside the WTO’s purview, over 70 percent of global trade is still conducted under the WTO’s “most favored nation” principle. The point of the multilateral trading system is to ensure the fair and equitable treatment of all its members. Tariffs and other infringements of WTO rules end up hurting everyone.

The keyword missing from the entire article is “neoliberalism”.

The global trade over the past few decades has been sustained by the US running a permanent trade deficit and becoming the global debtor (as opposed to the previous superpowers e.g. British empire that ran a global creditor strategy), which allowed productive capacity to migrate into the developing world to drive global wages down and destroy domestic labor union movements that had grown very powerful in the post-war industrialization era.

The end result is a global overcapacity of production from the Global South, which is what made cheap goods possible. Trade is no longer used for exchanging goods between countries, but as a deliberate strategy to accumulate financial assets (US dollars) to make their budget deficit look small, as advised by the IMF. In other words, Global South labor produce real goods and services for the wealthy Global North countries to enjoy, in exchange for a number in their bank accounts.

The Euros had been enjoying the benefits of this US imperial strategy and it is only now that they are being outplayed by the US, their industries are uncompetitive against the Chinese, that they start worrying about “international trade is unfair”. Well, it has always been.

The wildcard for the global West in all of this will be whether the United States wants to preserve the multilateral world order it has been so instrumental in building and from which it has benefited so greatly.

Yes, and the preservation of this world order (or rather, the new iteration of this world order) requires Europe to make the sacrifice. The long-term deindustrialization of the US had intensified the contradictions of American capitalism, and the most prominent trend over the past decade has been the rise of Trump MAGA movement on the right and Bernie Sanders and now Zohran Mamdani’s movement on the left, after the great financial crash in 2008.

This contradiction cannot be resolved internally, but it can be exported to other parts of the world. The Europeans are being disciplined because after the fall of the USSR, the euro has emerged as a major competitor to the US dollar, which threatened the hegemony of the US financial empire. You can imagine what the US has ready for the Europeans now that their economic sovereignty has been strangled after the Ukraine war, and totally outplayed by the US.

Without examining the contradictions of global capitalism, geopolitical analysis is reduced to arguing which sport team is better or more fun to watch (which is what this article essentially is), but ultimately unable to understand the fundamental driving force of capital that shapes geopolitical tensions around the world.

The wildcard for the global East will be how China plays its hand on the world stage. It could take more steps to fill the power vacuums left by the United States in areas such as free trade, climate change cooperation, and development. It could try to shape the international institutions it now has a much stronger foothold in. It might seek to further project power in its own region.

Until China has finally come to the realization that neoliberalism needs to be abandoned, we will not see any fundamental changes.

The excitement about the rise of BRICS a few years ago only made it so much more disappointing when literally none of the BRICS countries shows any will to abandon neoliberal policies.

Where is the new economic doctrine proposal? You won’t find any, and certainly none in all of the BRICS summits since 2022.

How is the foreign currency-denominated debt of the Global South countries going to be resolved? Meanwhile, China is hoarding trillions and trillions of dollar reserves which has become an obsession, rather than putting them into good use. If a solution to this key issue cannot be found, the finance capital led by the US will continue to reign supreme.