The US President has been blocking an important body of the World Trade Organization for months. The European Union is now presenting a new association. That should impress Washington for one reason in particular.
Under President Donald Trump, the United States has strongly been away from the world. He showed this most recently in the current corona crisis, in which Trump speaks disparagingly of the crisis reaction of Europeans despite the desperate situation in his own country and even calls the coronavirus the China virus. While Brussels was only astonished at the beginning of Trump’s tenure in view of the new tones from Washington, the stiffness in the shock has now given way to a grim determination.
Europe has no choice but to work on a new world order in the age of Trump – and the latest result is now presented by EU Trade Commissioner Phil Hogan. His employees have been working for months to keep the global trade order alive despite Trump’s attacks: not only that the US imposes punitive tariffs on key trading partners and thus destroys wealth worldwide.
The US government is also working to ensure that trading partners within the WTO can no longer defend themselves against punitive tariffs . To do this, they block the dispute settlement within the Geneva organization that has been working successfully for almost a quarter of a century.