Global Economic Cooperation Remains Key to National Prosperity
The Bretton Woods institutions are nearly as old as Joe Biden. They need an update, but in navigating a changing world, they’ve never been more necessary.
Still necessary after all these years.
UN Photo
The current retreat from global economic cooperation is strangely timed. You might have expected, or at least hoped, that a worldwide pandemic on top of alarm over climate change would have compelled governments to pursue collective economic action more urgently. Such problems defy narrowly national solutions. It’s effective international cooperation or bust. Yet here we are, guided by the US, dismantling the “rules-based international order” that, within living memory, was seen as essential for advancing global prosperity.
The administrations of Donald Trump and Joe Biden have crippled the World Trade Organization, the entity the US created to oversee liberal international trade, by failing to appoint judges to its appellate body and by flouting trade rules to indulge the new appetite for protectionist industrial policy. The other Bretton Woods institutions – the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank – are drifting, weakened by disagreements among their big government shareholders, and struggling to define their roles.