Creon Butler

speaker

276 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 7 Aug

Creon Butler’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Independent Thinking · Rules against power: Does the world need a new economic alliance to balance the US and China? · 5 Jun 2026 podcast

That would just take too long.

But I think there is a real scope for these two blocks to uphold, if you like, the in existing international system as we knew it.

Yes, and I think, you know, in a way, Gregor's right that there are many ways you cut the system up, if you like.

But I mean what I'm suggesting is in a sense not a poll built about the European Union.

Although the European Union is an essential member, in fact, if you did have the the two blocks together, so CPTPP and uh the European Union, they're broadly equal size in terms of both GDP and population.

So you would have if you like a more balanced block.

Of a bigger scale.

And I think the other thing is that in a way, the rest of the world is not going to accept, if you like, an extension of the EU way of doing things across, you know, global south, emerging economies, other advanced economies, and so on.

And therefore, in a way, this is not, if you like, the model of extraterritoriality.

It's more that these two groups come together and say, we want to sustain.

this system and we're going to work together to achieve that and we're going to create this maximum space for rules based approach to trade investment and other economic issues.

So I think the difficulty with the variable coalitions is that on the one hand, yes, you can sort of optimise the group of countries you have for a particular goal.

On the other hand, it's very inefficient to have, you know, multiple coalitions of on different issues because actually global economic governance requires an awful lot of resources.

Also, it's hard to have, if you like, an overarching leader level direction when you've got different coalitions, one

One is for trade ministers, one is for people in who are experts in minerals, uh, one is for AI, and so on.

So the goal is to say let's focus all our effort on one single major grouping, the third pole, with an overarching leadership from the highest level, and then do all the things that we need to do to deal with the Trump shock and with the impact of uh China's approach to the international.

economic system to do it all in one place.

And that, from my experience, is a lot more viable, is also something that is quite visionary.

I mean if part of the problem up to now has been if people have said, Well what is my alternative to but go along with the US or go along with China, there isn't an alternative.

If you have here is the third pole, this is your alternative, these are the people you can align with, then it's gonna have more impact.

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