Donald Trump has taken the US to the brink of a tech cold war The conflict between the US and China is not just for technological supremacy, but over two competing ideologies. Thomas Peter-Pool/Getty Images
The former president Donald Trump at a bilateral meeting with China s President Xi Jinping in 2017 Once a little-known regional telecoms company, Huawei has grown into a tech behemoth and one of China’s biggest success stories. But over the past decade, it has increasingly faced scrutiny from the West, and in the process become embedded in escalating Sino-American tensions. The global push to build 5G networks has repeatedly made headlines because of the central role played by Huawei’s technology. But, despite the US’s best efforts to lobby other countries to keep Huawei out of their networks, it remains a key market player,
My 2021 Trade Policy Wish List SHARE
If I had to choose a word to describe the trade landscape in 2020, a strong candidate would have to be
disruption. The first three quarters of the year witnessed an 8.2 percent drop in the volume of world merchandise trade, compared to last year, and it is still unclear if there will be a deeper plunge as the year draws to a close. But this downward trend, while rapidly accelerated by the pandemic, had already begun in 2019 due to increasing global trade tension. In fact, the World Trade Organization (WTO) estimated a 0.1 percent drop in merchandise trade volume in 2019, with the dollar value of world merchandise exports falling by 3 percent, to the tune of $18.89 trillion USD. While it will take time for us to recover, I offer five practical ideas for trade policy in 2021 that can help ease the economic burden on Americans, repair our fraught relationship with our closest trading partners, and revitalize the rules-based trading system.