After strong growth in 2024, global trade will take a hit this year. Many point the finger at President Donald Trump. That's a mistake.The World Trade Organization said the volume of merchandise trade this year will contract by 0.2 percent. Its revised forecast "is nearly three percentage points lower than it would have been without recent policy shifts."
The culprit? The trade body blames "a surge in tariffs and trade policy uncertainty." That, of course, is an indirect reference to Trump's series of tariff hikes, pauses, and pullbacks.Just about everyone thinks Trump is responsible for the breakdown of the global trade system.A banner showing a picture of President Donald Trump is displayed outside of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) building on June 3, 2025, in Washington, D.C. Kevin Carter/Getty Images
The Associated Press, for instance, wrote that the American president declared "a trade war on the rest of the world." By doing so, he has "panicked global financial markets, raised the risk of a recession and broken the political and economic alliances that made much of the world stable for business after World War II."That narrative is superficial. It's far more accurate to say the post-war rules-based trade order is dead, but China killed it, and Trump stopped pretending it continued to exist.
There had been great hope at the turn of the century that China would end long-standing predatory and criminal trade practices by joining the World Trade Organization. By and large, however, Beijing did not abandon those practices after accession in December 2001.Trump, in response to Chinese intransigence, changed the world, irrevocably. As POLITICO wrote, "The Trump administration has dealt a lasting blow to much of the post-World War II consensus around free trade and long-term cooperation." Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, at the just-concluded Aspen Security Forum said, "We have to recognize that we're probably not going back to exactly that system."
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