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 · last 12 months

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

The first one is in the trading investment area where essentially US has moved from a a country that primarily since the Second World War was focused on achieving a mutual system of benefits.

Broad based, low tariffs, free trade and investment flows, to one which is much more about extracting the maximum benefit for the US from its trade relationships and particularly through bilateral relationships.

But the other element that's alongside that is, if you like, the withdrawal of the US from a range of public goods that in the past it's been critical in supporting.

So the one everyone's very familiar.

familiar with is President Trump's views on climate change and the withdrawal from support for net zero.

We've also got withdrawal from support for monetary and financial stability, for energy security following what's happened in Iran, and also for poverty reduction.

So given this Trump shock,

The question then c becomes, you know, how should the rest of the world respond?

And the argument I've made is that it's actually very hard to, if you like, span the difference of view between where the US is and where the rest of the world is.

And that in order to maintain the kind of rules based system that has served us well since the Second World War, uh, we need to develop a a new alliance of countries for whom that is their primary focus.

You could say, well, should that include China?

I think the problem with including China is that actually China, although over a longer period of time, has also, if you like, undermined uh some of the key rules for the uh international economic system, uh particularly in the trade and investment area, but also through deploying economic coercion and so forth.

Вела I think China has had long had a different view.

of, for example, issues like the role of subsidies, the role of public procurement, the extent to which it should support uh businesses within the Chinese economy, to the way, if you like, the the rules-based system was developed and the way the WTO is developed.

So in a sense, we're not seeing, if you like, a new approach in China.

What we're seeing is a much, much bigger Chinese economy in which this different way of doing things is becoming

More and more of a problem for the rest of the world.

I think I think what one can say is that it's Chinese approach um has become more and more significant for the world economy as China's scale has grown.

And therefore, if you're looking for a a group of countries who would seek to uphold that rules based system, and indeed if one looks at the data, something like seventy percent of world trade is still done on WTO rules.

You need to look at a group which doesn't include at the moment US and doesn't include at the moment China.

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