In Washington, German monologues were simply ignored.
(Photo: dpa)
Sometimes it says something about a suggestion even if it isn’t talked about. When US President Joe Biden starts his summit marathon in Brussels on Thursday, he will in all likelihood avoid one topic: the new edition of the transatlantic free trade agreement TTIP brought up by Federal Finance Minister Christian Lindner.
It is grotesque that Germany has been talking to itself for days about an idea that neither Washington nor Brussels is seriously pursuing – and with good reason. “There will be no TTIP or a slimmed down TTIP light,” says a senior EU official who has been dealing with trade issues for years.
Economics Minister Robert Habeck got to the heart of why this is so: Germany should not now have an “ideological debate” that “blocks the way for a cooperative understanding”.
For this very reason, Washington simply ignored German soliloquies. Mainly because a few months before the important midterm elections in November, Biden has absolutely no interest in opening a barrel about free trade domestically. That would only provide Trump’s Republicans with a new target and jeopardize the inner-party peace among the Democrats that Biden has just laboriously achieved with his “trade policy for the middle class”.
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It is more promising to use and expand the Technology and Trade Council (TTC) initiated by the EU and the USA. This is the right forum now to harness and coordinate the allies’ geoeconomic power against dictatorships like Russia and China. However, the TTC is not a nucleus for a new free trade agreement.
World economy is breaking up into geopolitical blocs
However, Lindner’s economic reflex is not that wrong: the geopolitical “turning point” of the war in Ukraine will lead to the formation of economic blocs depending on the current situation. As a result, Europe’s economic relations not only with Russia but also with China will become less important. Conversely, trade with like-minded countries like the US and Canada is becoming more important.
The fact that the Americans have now reached an agreement with Great Britain, as before with the EU and Japan, on reducing punitive tariffs is an important step in this direction. Bringing the USA back on board with the reform of the World Trade Organization would be a further signal. Poorly timed attempts to revive TTIP, on the other hand, would do more harm than good to transatlantic unity.
More: Habeck vs. Lindner – coalition argues about new TTIP edition.