If this week’s issue of The Economist is to be believed, Donald Trump, whether wittingly or not, may be playing the bad cop with the EU and the Chinese in an effort to strengthen, not destroy, the WTO. As the story goes, he’s trying to create a crisis which will ultimately result in a WTO that is friendlier to the US and to other genuine market economies, because the alternative, an all-out trade war, will be even worse for the Chinese.
If true, it sounds eerily like Kaiser Wilhelm II trying to intimidate the British into an alliance by increasing the size of his fleet. We all know how that turned out.
The reality, however, is that Trump has nothing but contempt for the EU, international organizations, and the rule of law. He longs for a world in which the US is free to use its military and economic power to serve its own selfish interests without regard to the rest of the world. He wants America to be the new Russia.
There may be people in his administration who secretly hope to save the WTO with hardball tactics, but Trump isn’t one of them, and in the final analysis, he is the only one that matters.