Valdai Club

US international behavior in response to COVID19 is consistent with the foreign policy patterns of Trumps “America First” nationalism: disdain for, and retreat from, global institutions and agreements, creating a vacuum, and more fraying of international institutions,


The US and China are the largest economic and two largest trading powers in the world. The outcome of current trade negotiations will have a large impact on the future of the global trade system. Despite President Trump’s heavy-handed tactics – tariffs, etc, China’s mercantilist industrial policies have drawn a similar response from much of the world: the EU, Japan, Australia and other nations.

Facing its ‘most dynamic and formidable competitor in modern history’, Washington increasingly does away with hopeful thinking and seeks new approaches towards Asia. It raised the concept of the Indo-Pacific region.

Over the past ten years, the Asia-Pacific region (APR) has been the global economy’s main center of gravity. The world’s leading non-Asian centers of power, the United States and Russia, almost simultaneously announced their turn to the Asia Pacific and proclaimed the region a main foreign policy priority. However, the region’s economic order remains unclear, and represents a concentration of diverse and often incompatible projects and regimes.

A policy of simultaneous antagonization of Russia and China, which consciously or unconsciously is carried out by the White House, is the most serious foreign policy mistake of the United States.