While the world’s press is busy lapping up the anti-Trump hysteria post-G7, let’s stop and ask what did they expect? Via The Guardian:
Donald’s Trump’s chief economic adviser said the US pulled out of a G7 communique because the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, “stabbed us in the back” and accused the leader of one America’s most important allies of playing a “sophomoric political stunt for domestic consumption”.
In an extraordinary interview with CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, Larry Kudlow, who was present for negotiations at the G7 summit in Quebec over the weekend, said Trudeau had instigated “a betrayal” and was “essentially double-crossing President Trump”.
Trudeau used a media conference on Saturday to reject a US demand for a sunset clause in the North American trade agreement, Nafta, that Trump has at different times pressed to abolish or renegotiate. The prime minister also said Canada would “move forward with retaliatory measures” in response to the Trump administration’s move to impose tariffs on aluminium and steel imports from the European Union, Mexico and Canada.
The move enraged Trump, who branded his Canadian counterpart “dishonest and weak” in a furious tweet, announcing the US would pull out of an agreed communique.
The G7 communique said the leaders of seven of the most powerful countries in the world agreed on the need for “free, fair, and mutually beneficial trade” and the importance of fighting protectionism.
The G7 ALL run trade surpluses with the US:
What did they think was going to happen as they pressed a claim for even larger surpluses via a statement of free trade? These same nations exist under the protection of US hegemony worldwide. Trump is obnoxious but he has also been very clear about what he expects in return for that protection: trade favours. That’s why Australia got off the hook. We run a US deficit.
Europe and Japan face existential strategic risks in Russia and China. Both are run by dictators intent on pressing their interests further into the democratic realm. Tearing it down if they can. This is a systemic risk to the underpinnings of liberty that makes free trade possible at all. Yet the G7 chose instead to provoke Trump. If anyone is surprised by the response then I can provide them the contact of an excellent psychiatrist.
There are many ways that the G7 could have come to the meeting with offerings to assuage the US anger represented in Donald Trump (basically its marginalised working classes) without violating the rules based order of geopolitics. Instead they chose to prod the beast in a vain attempt to appear to protect those rules. Virtue signalling in other words.
Forgotten is that Donald Trump is the symptom not the disease. The real malady is a US economy now so divided by class that it is throwing up Hail Mary politicians. Would the G7 have gotten a better hearing from Bernie Sanders? Nope. He too wants to repair the lot of American workers and would renegotiate trade to make it happen.
It’s all well and good for Davos Man to pat himself on the back for defending free trade but if in doing so he is undermining the very foundations of global liberalism then good luck with that.
