Economic Blacklist of Russia Marks New Blow for Globalization
HAS BUNGLING BIDEN'S WEAK VIRTUE SIGNALING KILLED GLOBALISM?
The U.S.-led effort to expel Russia from international commerce marks another fracture in the free-trade vision that guided American policy for nearly 30 years.
“The trading system as we’ve known it, with the World Trade Organization at its core and with a basic set of rules that everyone traded under, is coming apart,” said Jennifer Hillman, a trade lawyer and former jurist on the WTO’s trade court who now teaches international law at Georgetown University.
The concept of globalization—nations trading with few barriers, focusing on the industries and services they do best—has been under pressure for years, driven by economic rivalries, factory closings in wealthy countries and those who say open borders aren’t in the best national interest,
Bill Reinsch, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank focused on U.S. national security, says the moves to isolate Russia are “very satisfying in the short run, but nobody wants to talk about the long-term consequences of weakening international institutions.”
“By 1995, we had this ‘one world’ view of things,” said Douglas Irwin, a professor of economics and historian of global trade at Dartmouth College. “There’s not different systems, there’s one set of rules under the WTO, and global value chains, and global supply chains, and everything is integrated.”
Mr. Irwin says signs of strain to this system have been mounting for years. An effort begun in 2001 known as the Doha Development Round, designed to cut agricultural tariffs and better help the world’s poor in an era of globalization, failed.
Though America will stop buying Russian oil, someone else will.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/economic-blacklist-of-russia-marks-new-blow-for-globalization-11646940040
