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

So I think as far as the US is concerned, I mean i in a way we've seen a very sudden change, um, President Trump compared with President Biden.

But at the same time, if we were to have a further change

You know, a democratic president, it would be very hard for a new president to, if you like, put back many of the things that President Trump has done.

In some areas it's because, let's say, a democratic president, they actually share some of the skepticism about free trade that President Trump has shown.

In other areas, it may just be even if they would like to make those changes, it's very hard for them to put things back.

And we in in fact saw with President Biden that there were a number of trade measures that were adopted in the first Trump process.

Presidency that President Biden chose not to reverse.

Now, you know, over the longer term, who knows where the US will be.

It used to believe in these things in the past and it may come back to believing to those things in the future.

You know, similarly, as far as China's concerned, I mean, if you go back to 2010 or so, the assumption was in a way there would be a convergence.

That was actually the principle behind the G twenty between China's approach and that of other countries.

That's turned out not to happen, but it's possible that at some stage in the future we would see a a convergence back towards a rules based system.

As I say, if if you look at the rest of the world, I mean there are groups.

So the example I use or the case I make is if you take the EU and the countries of the C P T P P, which is essentially a block of mostly Asian countries but also includes the UK, you have a block

Which is something like more than thirty percent of world GDP, close to fifty percent of world trade, close to fifty percent of the votes in the IMF.

So this is a very substantial block, which is bigger than either the US or China separately.

So if that group was to work together as a, if you like, a third pole alongside the US poll and the Chinese poll, then you would have a situation in which they could not only with

In their economic space, preserve the rules, but they would have a lot of influence on China and the US simply through their their scale and their mass.

Now the key question will be how well coordinated can they be?

And you know, I'm not, for example, suggesting that the EU should become a member of CPTPP.

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