Understanding the Trade War: The Age of Destruction

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It’s not just disruption or the age of disruption but it’s also perhaps the age of destruction. If we don’t do something you’ll have these big statements because Trump loves, I mean he really is a master of marketing, he’s he’s the master of the lead. He knows how to agitate people and then you have to sort of go through and see what actually it means. The usual playbook on how to respond to these things doesn’t work, none of them work because they’re based on logic and strategy and usual responses to these things. So, we have to figure out what else to do. It’s going to be at least two years if not four years, but also it’s not just one guy. There’s tons of people behind him scenario building, figuring out what plan B, C, D is. They’ve been doing this and and they’ve been plotting this for a long time. Now to think that it’s it’s just something just a bad dream and if we wake up someday and it’ll be a different scenario, it is not good enough. So it’s going to continue, maybe in a different form but it’s not going to go away all of a sudden. I start reading papers in other provinces just because I can’t deal with that noise, let’s see what everybody else is doing in Canada and what can we do about that. It’s the end of the beginning of trying to figure out how we’re going to be a serious country.

Phil Rourke, Executive Director of the Centre for Trade Policy and Law of Carleton University, argues that we must rethink how we respond to the Trump administration’s upheaval of the global economic order, as our “usual playbook”, based on logic and strategy, is not going to work.

“To think that it’s just a bad dream and if we wake someday it’s going to be a different scenario is not good enough”, he emphasizes. “It’s not going to go away.”

This interview was conducted as part of the work of the Chaire de recherche en droit du commerce responsable, durable et inclusif (Research Chair in Responsible, Sustainable and Inclusive Trade Law), during a workshop organized by professors Wolfgang Alschner, Patrick Leblond and Geneviève Dufour, Gabrielle Marceau and Valériane Thool entitled “ American economic coercion: issues and responses for Canada and the global economy ”.

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About the resercher
Phil Rourke

Phil Rourke has 30 years of experience the design, negotiation and implementation of international trade strategies. This includes working directly with senior trade officials from Russia, China, Jamaica, Barbados, Cuba, Costa Rica, Colombia, Peru, Mozambique, Panama, Georgia, Armenia, Ukraine, and Canada.

He currently is the Executive Director of the Centre for Trade Policy and Law of Carleton University and is a lecturer in trade policy and trade negotiations at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs (NPSIA) at Carleton University and at the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law.

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