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Your guide to what the 2024 American elections mean for Washington and the world
US foreign policy under Donald Trump is widely described as transactional. And rightly so. The president’s mindset can only be described as extremely nonimed for international cooperation.
Trump has little care of global norms or institutions – prove his immediate withdrawal, to assuming the US by the Paris Climate Agreement (once again) and the World Health Organization. Its world appearance is very zero, focused on short -term victory than on magnificent strategies.
The event of the President’s conception of security and economic interests is illustrated by his threats to wage a 1930 -style tariff warfare for friends, neighbors and enemies alike. And, more colorful, from his point of view of alliances as protective missiles.
Note, however, that the world was going transactional far ahead of Trump. China’s growth, which under Xi Jinping has mercilessly sought to assert power and influence around the world, made a fracture in transactional blockages of very inevitable global power.
Also striking is that the increase in transactionalism extends beyond foreign policy. The interactive challenges for international cooperation are numerous.
The first and most important is the climate change which, everyone agrees, requires a global solution. This is what has to do with the pop summit process without supporting. However, the KB itself says that to maintain global warming to no more than 1.5C, emissions must be cut by 45 percent by 2030 and reach zero by 2050.
Very bad that national climate plans by signatories in the Paris Agreement would lead, suggests KB, at a strong 2.6 percent landing of global emissions by 2030, compared to 2019 levels. A regular power transition is Thus, in current politics, a mirage. In fact, the growing concern of growing governments and companies for the political and economic cost of decarbonization has created an increasingly transactional approach to this extraordinary global challenge.
Meanwhile, the failure of developed countries to fulfill the promises of climate funding in the developing world has shocked confidence in the multilateral process between those who experience extreme weather or increase sea levels.
One fundamental difficulty is that, if China accounts for over 30 percent of current global emissions, it is because the developed world has transferred its brightest industries to Asia. However, the relatively low emissions of Europe allow populist politicians to say that we have no moral obligation to withdraw from fossil fuels.
Next, immigration. Geopolitical strains and global warming in the Middle East and Africa run countless immigrants to Europe. Given the resulting pressure on housing, public services and the rest, this is screaming for sharing the cooperative burden between EU member states. Unfortunately the time for cooperative humanitarian solutions is past.
The growth of anti-immigrant populist parties is now an embedded feature of the European political landscape. Germany is the main specimen, not only because former Angela Merkel promoted the rise of the distant right, an alternative anti-immigration for Germany (AFD) offering an open door to asylum seekers who escape the Syrian civil war.
AFD is now holding second in voting for Christian Democrats before the federal elections on February 23. For Germany and Europe, there is no escape from a national, transactional approach to immigration.
Artificial intelligence is just as problematic. There are few areas of human activity where it will not benefit. But these benefits are being unevenly distributed by a small part of the countries and companies. There are also numerous risks, including ethical ones; losses of work by structural adjustment caused by it; and the existential dangers where it can overcome human intelligence. However, international cooperative international initiatives have made little progress. Governments and companies are very desperate to muscle in that Gold Rush.
Finally in business. Economist John Kay has convincingly argued that successful modern companies are necessarily cooperative communities in which technical progress and business development are based on establishing collective intelligence in innovative combinations. If he is right, the success of the corporation is often destroyed by a bonus culture in which stimuli stimuli are led by metrics related to performance -related salaries. This encourages a short-term transaction-buying of witnesses’ frenetic shares along with reduced investments to postpone after all.
These flowering and costly species of transactionalism are becoming rapidly widespread. We live in what can soon be an unbearable transactional era.
john.plender@ft.com
