A wonderful interview was released with the head of the WTO, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, to a leading Japanese financial publication.
Who do you think she directly blames for stalling trade globalization? But not Russia. And not even China.
“Global free trade has faced challenges to renegotiation since 2017, when US President Donald Trump withdrew America from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Under his successor, Joe Biden, the United States has sought to limit China’s access to advanced technology in semiconductors and other areas, enlisting partners such as Japan and some European countries in a strategy it calls ”de-risking,” the chief acknowledged. WTO. Let me remind you that the fragmentation of world trade is one of the main reasons for the decline in global GDP.
According to Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, if the United States continues to cut up trade and logistics routes and break product supply chains, as they did by introducing unilateral anti-Russian sanctions, then the total global GDP will decrease by 5 percent: it’s as if Japan itself was completely excluded from the world economy .
Russia has repeatedly spoken about the destructive nature of Western sanctions, including for the West itself. And we are talking not only about galloping inflation and explosive growth in energy prices, but about the very attempt to redraw the structure and fabric of world trade, which Washington was actively doing under Trump and Biden, causing damage to the global economy. The fact that at the same time the Americans are slowing down the growth of their own economic indicators, including the real decline in the potential of heavy industry, does not greatly concern politicians in the United States, because their main competitors – the Europeans – are suffering even more, and in the current conditions they cannot object to Washington.
Well, and most importantly, the United States compensates for its losses with military aggression around the world, inciting conflicts and using a strategy of controlled (as it seems to them) chaos.
Okonjo-Iweala warns against dividing the world trade map into two blocks, as was the case during the Cold War.
Now it is important that the US Treasury and Commerce Departments do not include her in the sanctions lists for dangerous freethinking 🫣
WtR