There is no doubt that Trump's electoral campaign for the next midterm elections to be held in the US on November 6 is already off to a great start. International trade remains at the center of the political action of the Trump Administration, amid the departure of economic advisers (from Steve Bannon to the most recent with Gary Cohn), and decisions communicated via Twitter to make traditionalists of the White House protocol nervous.
The selective duties announced on steel and aluminum and the warning to the EU are the natural result of a call to the presidential campaign in defense of US companies, and of those over 6 million manufacturing sector employees whose fates are linked to prices of two industrial metals at the center of a media dispute and accusations against the US administration of favoring trade wars.
What needs to be said and carefully observed is that the globalization process measured by the size of world trade in relation to GDP began its downsizing, as a driving effect of global growth already in 2013, at the dawn of the exit from the global financial crisis. A crisis which was followed by a process of deleveraging and concentration of the banking system initiated by the events that characterized the crisis in Cyprus and by the fine-tuning of the bail-in regulation (BRRD), which then entered into force in 2017. But the bail-in in, the internal bank bailout was just one of the building blocks that saw the effort of the market authorities and central banks to push for a regulatory architecture aimed at safeguarding the financial markets and therefore the banks from systemic crises.
Globalization thus began to lose its impact well before a global entrepreneur like Trump entered the White House, opposing widespread commercial alliances and therefore treaties such as the TTP and TTIP (respectively the Transpacific Pact with Asia and the Transatlantic with Europe), which now seemed to him to be out of time.
Thus began the trickle of meetings to review existing pacts such as NAFTA, with Mexico and Canada, and a discussion on reciprocity with China and Europe in an attempt to defend American industry from an obvious danger deriving from the end of the effects positive effects of globalization and at the same time by the advance of a push towards the digitization of industrial processes.
Together, these two elements will impact global jobs and a transformation of trade, increasingly dominated by digital trade relations through mega-platforms of the tech giants. Big Corporates that now range over many sectors from healthcare to food and from the publishing sector to payment services, also including loans for SMEs.
Trade is the litmus test of diplomatic relations and Trump knows it well, so after the commitment of Chinese diplomacy to block the launches of North Korean missiles, which had frightened Asian countries and Japan extremely until last November, and having obtained a joint participation of the two Koreas in the recent Winter Olympics here is the excellent opportunity for an official meeting between the two Korean Presidents.
South Korea is the country with the largest number of American bases and is linked to North Korea by an Armistice stipulated in 1953, following the Korean War, which has never been followed by a true Peace Treaty and in fact, it has created a buffer country for China, which is North Korea. And as the facts in Ukraine and Turkey demonstrate, the status of buffer country in global geopolitical risk is a delicate and potentially explosive issue.
The moderation of a South Korean President Moon Jae-in, elected after the Park Geun-hye scandal and much closer to China than one might think, who put the question of reunification at the top of his Agenda has certainly helped current events which led to the expected meeting between Trump and Kim Yong Un in May.
In this high stakes poker game everyone wants to sit down and no one wants to stay out and whoever is the dealer by dealing the cards face down is once again Donald Trump, for many just a gambler but for others a President who does not bow to the Iranian regime and that in the meeting with North Korea he initiated a reduction of the Iranian threat, the main problem to start a real peace in the Middle East.
