During the Great Depression of the 1930s, we immediately saw states turn inward. They became isolationist and, to do so, imposed very, very, very high tariffs: 60%, 80%, 100%, it could even go beyond that.
During the Second World War, during, as early as 1940, we realized that this protectionist context had caused even more antagonism, had contributed to increasing tensions.
And so, there were heads of state who met, those of the United Kingdom, the United States, and who tried to shape the world of tomorrow and who signed the Atlantic Charter. And in that charter, it was precisely planned that what was needed was to liberalize trade, to make countries more interdependent with one another.
For the past few weeks, the Trump administration has been sowing chaos. And all countries are acting and reacting quite unilaterally for now, so each country is adopting its countermeasures, seeing what it needs to do, how it needs to do it. And that’s the problem.
That’s the problem because, probably, if we persist in this way of doing things, it will be the end of the system as we have known it since the end of the Second World War.
It is a highly imperfect system. I’m not saying that this system is perfect, on the contrary, it’s an imperfect system that we should modify, that we should make more inclusive, because we have to ask ourselves the question, right, why are all these populations frustrated with international trade? It’s because we haven’t been able to give them what they are entitled to.
The problem is: will we let the Trump administration sow chaos in the short, medium, or long term? And that depends on how the other countries of the world react.
Countries are starting to talk to each other, countries are systematically insisting on the rule of law. When it gets to the point where China is telling us: “We want to continue playing by the rules of the multilateral trade system, we support the World Trade Organization,” and it denounces the actions of the United States—the United States, which are the ones who created the system we live in…
The World Trade Organization is largely the result of what the Americans wanted as a system. A system that includes all the countries of the world, but, I repeat, this system must continue to be improved, it is not perfect.
But to say that we are reverting to a system of chaos, of anarchy, an unpredictable system, that would be terrible. We are no longer capable of producing everything, we are no longer capable of becoming self-sufficient, we must rely on others. So, if we rely on others, we cannot go to war with them, and that is the foundation of the multilateral trade system.
