The meeting of G20 finance ministers in Baden Baden on Saturday 18 March concluded with a bitter taste in the mouths of the United States’ partners in the group that brings together the planet’s largest economies, with Donald Trump’s administration casting doubt on the global doctrine of free trade and multilateralism.
New US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin managed to have removed from the G20 Finance final statement all reference to a commitment from the parties to challenge and tackle any form of protectionism, a first in the history of the G20 for which this commitment has always been one of its guiding principles.
In their final statement, the G20 ministers stated only: “We are working to strengthen the contribution of trade to our economies”.
“What was in the past communique is not necessarily relevant from my standpoint”, Mnuchin said at a news conference. “I understand what the president’s desire is and his policies, and I negotiated them from here. I couldn't be happier with the outcome”, he added.
“We believe in free trade, we are in one of the largest markets in the world, we are one of the largest trading partners in the world, trade has been good for us, it has been good for other people. Having said that, we want to re-examine certain agreements”, Mnuchin said, adding that the North American Free-Trade Agreement (NAFTA) would have to be reviewed, some WTO rules needed to be “better enforced” and older agreements “may have to be renegotiated”.
With discussions on the form of words to be used on trade in stalemate, “at the end we said nothing on [avoiding protectionism], because it meant different things when we said we did not want protectionism”, explained German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaüble, who hosted the meeting.
Deeply unhappy at a “disagreement between one country and all the others”, French Economy Minister Michel Sapin stated that the wording used by the G20 Finance “reflected not a step backwards but deadlock of the situation”. Sapin was also unhappy that the principal of “multilateral resolution of difficulties no longer featured in the G20 conclusions”, notably with regard to tackling climate change (see other article).
A circumspect IMF head Christine Lagrade suggested that the US administration was still at the bedding-in stage. (Original version in French by Emmanuel Hagry)