‘America first’ attitude rocks trade meeting
G20 finance leaders omit criticism of protectionism from statement
BADEN-BADEN, Germany — The United States broke with other large industrial nations over trade on Saturday as the Trump administration rejected concerns among allies about spreading protectionism and made clear that it would seek new approaches to managing global commerce.
At a meeting of finance ministers and central bankers from the Group of 20 industrialized and emerging nations and the European Union, Steven Mnuchin, attending his first major international gathering as Treasury secretary, signaled that U.S. policy would follow the campaign promises made by President Donald Trump: putting “America first” and reviewing trade agreements to seek better deals for the United States.
As a result, the ministers’ joint statement, normally a study in blandness, became an unlikely focus of controversy. The representatives could agree only on a tortured compromise stating, in effect, that trade is a good thing. Adjectives such as “open” were dropped, and the ministers omitted language used in previous communiqués that condemned protectionism, repudiating decades of free trade doctrine.
For Asian and European officials, many of them meeting their Trump administration counterparts for the first time, it was a lesson in how Trump and his team are overturning long-held assumptions about international commerce.
Mnuchin led the ministers’ meeting Friday with a declaration that current trade rules are unfair to the United States, positioning the administration against virtually all the other participants, according to an official who attended the closed session.
“We thought that it was very important for the communiqué to reflect what we discussed here,” Mnuchin said at a news conference Saturday. “The historical language was not relevant.”
At the insistence of the United States, the communiqué also dropped a pledge to observe the Paris accords on climate change.