The Internationalism

Internationalism No. 88, June 2026 Page 13 In 2025, China was the only power to respond decisively to Donald Trump's trade war, forcing him into an autumn truce through tariffs and, primarily, by blocking exports of some critical minerals. According to the White House, Beijing made a mistake in using the nuclear weapon of its near-monopoly on rare earths, as it triggered a global rush to diversify supplies. That process is indeed underway, but given its high costs and long timescales, it does not seem able to neutralise, at least in the short term, the powerful mineral deterrent established by the Chinese government. A multilateral Trump The US government's counteroffensive is underway both domestically, in an attempt to rebuild an industrial sector for the extraction and processing of these substances in the US, and internationally, through a series of agreements. Among the mo...

Internationalism No. 86, April 2026 Page 13 The United States has been arguing for the need to reform the WTO since well before Donald Trump unleashed his world tariff war. In 2015, Michael Froman, President Barack Obama’s trade representative, denounced the failure of the Doha Round, a major negotiation underway since 2001 but bogged down in its own ambition to reach a comprehensive agreement among all countries on every aspect of world trade. Froman’s solution was pragmatic multilateralism , capable of proceeding through sectoral agreements or between small groups of nations. Behind the arcane formulations of international law, Washington’s real accusation against the WTO, then as now, is that it has facilitated the spectacular rise of China’s industrial power. Longstanding issues Decisions on WTO reform can only come from its Ministerial Conference, held every two year...