‘if The United States Wants To Retire ... Others Will Have To Take Over’

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former secretary-general of NATO, has a soft spot for America.

“Since childhood, I have admired the U.S.,” he told me recently on a video call.

Yet when we spoke, Rasmussen had just finished a trip to Japan and India, where he was promoting his idea for a new trade alliance aimed at checking the power and influence of the United States. He calls it the “D7” — a coalition of affluent democracies with overlapping geopolitical interests — but says there’s no reason it needs to be limited to just seven economies. (During his visit, he nudged India, not included in his original conception, saying they could call it the D8.)

“I’ve seen the United States as a natural leader of the free world,” said Rasmussen, a former prime minister of Denmark. “But if the United States wants to retire from that role, then others will have to take over.”

It’s a grand ambition, and he’s not the only one thinking along those lines.

Trade ministers from Europe and a group of Asia-Pacific countries will meet on the sidelines of a gathering of the World Trade Organization in Cameroon this week to hammer out joint priorities for building such an alliance, in the vein of a vision outlined by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in Davos.

“The middle powers must act together, because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu,” Carney said in a viral speech in January.

The goal, as I understand it, is not to craft a future without the U.S., so much as one where these countries are less vulnerable to its whims, which these days often come in the form of tariffs.

There’s also a deeper significance that might matter more for whoever occupies the Oval Office after President Donald Trump: The rest of the world is rejecting Trump’s unbridled enthusiasm for trade restrictions, and they still want rules to govern them.

While it will take time before we fully see the consequences of Trump’s disruptions to the global trade order, these are early signs of an outcome he did not intend — and that's likely to anger him: a world where our allies no longer take their cues from U.S. leadership and instead make rules without us.

“Most of the rest of the world believes in global trade rules, believes that they benefit everyone, and they’re saying, ‘We are going to assume responsibility for pursuing those global trade rules,’” said Barbara Weisel, who was chief negotiator for the U.S. on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a massive free trade deal negotiated by President Barack Obama that Trump withdrew from before it took effect.

Ironically, TPP itself is one of the building blocks of this potential new trade coalition. That deal, renegotiated after America’s exit and now called the CPTPP, is one of two trade partnerships at the center of the initiative spearheaded by Carney. The other is the European Union. It’s a broad group of countries that also includes Australia, Brunei, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam and the U.K.

A senior Canadian government official tells my colleague Zi-Ann Lum that the meetings this week might help clarify the biggest priorities, but a deal could be done in bits and pieces, with the goal of achieving tangible progress as quickly as possible. One area where they’re hoping to reach a deal: so-called rules of origin, which would essentially ensure low tariffs for manufacturers trading between the two blocs.

The U.S. wouldn’t enjoy those benefits, an arrangement that could further antagonize Trump, who already didn’t love Carney’s idea when it was simply a speech.

“Canada gets a lot of freebies from us, by the way,” Trump said the day after the prime minister’s speech in Davos. “Canada lives because of the United States. Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements.”

It’s possible that this is the point: to poke the Trump administration in the eye, “i.e., send out a press release, not actually harmonize rules of origin,” said Hosuk Lee-Makiyama, a former Swedish and EU representative at the WTO.

After all, this “middle powers” undertaking will require tenacity to get done, particularly across regions with a lot of cultural and economic differences, and reaching a substantive deal could be difficult.

But Rasmussen doesn’t seem to think that’s what’s driving this. He told me, based on his conversations with various countries, that a significant roadblock is the fear that the U.S. might take this whole thing poorly.

“I think many governments will be cautious not to too openly provoke the Trump administration,” he said. “This cautiousness might represent the biggest obstacle to advancing this idea.”

Indeed, just last week, Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin visited the U.S. capital for his annual St. Patrick’s Day visit, and his message was straightforward: to advocate for closer ties.

“When America and Europe work together, we help shape a global economy that is more resilient, more innovative and more secure,” he said in remarks at a luncheon I attended with Irish business leaders in Washington.

I asked White House trade adviser Peter Navarro whether this effort to build a supergroup of middle powers might pose problems for the U.S.

“The U.S. shouldn't be worried about that, but it’s typical Carney behavior,” he told me onstage at a POLITICO event. “We’ve got a problem in Great Britain, in Canada, with liberal Trump haters.”

But, hey, maybe there’s room for common ground here. Navarro argued that the WTO needed to be overhauled, and that’s one of the pillars that the EU/CPTPP supergroup is set to discuss.

“What Carney should be saying is, ‘Hey, let’s reform the WTO in a way that doesn’t provide an advantage to people who want to use unfair trade practices,’” Navarro said.

Of course, the WTO is the natural venue to craft guidelines for global commerce, as that is its central purpose. But the U.S. began deciding, even before the Trump-led revolution against free trade, that it was much easier to make decisions with a coalition of the willing than to try to secure consensus from the entire world. That’s what ultimately led to the launch of the TPP negotiations in the first place, an effort that pointedly did not include China.

Now, other countries are making that same calculation. And this time, it also doesn’t include us.