News & insights

Olters, Jan-Peter (2025). ‘Letter: To call America’s bluff, let’s pursue free trade without it,’ Financial Times, 11 April 2025.

While ‘Global stocks tumble as Donald Trump offers no respite from tariffs‘ (Report, Financial Times, 7 April 2025), where are the visionary adults in the room—whether in Brussels, London, Ottawa, Tokyo, Seoul, Mexico City, or elsewhere—willing to take a strategic view and propose first steps towards maintaining a rules-based global trading order around and outside the US?

There is no reason why the rest of the world should not continue to have their economies reap the benefits of free trade, along the lines of existing free trade agreements such as Ceta (the EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement), Mercosur or the Asean-Australia-New Zealand free trade agreement and within the existing multilateral architecture.

Why not call an emergency summit, put existing trade rules into a comprehensive framework, turn the narrative on its head, and call America’s bluff?

Such a perspective would prevent the Trump tariffs from triggering a global depression and—in strengthening a multilateral order based on rules rather than power—be the most effective and least self-damaging retaliation to the current assault on the world economy.

By providing a counter-narrative and offering a perspective, this could play an important part in preventing another free fall in stock prices, at least in those stock exchanges outside Wall Street.