My guest is Peter Foster. Peter Foster is the World Trade Editor of the Financial Times,

reporting on the shifting landscape of global supply chains, investment and trade patterns being

reorientated as a result of pressures being applied by the second Trump administration.

Previously, Peter was UK policy editor, reporting on the UK's post-Brexit trade, regulatory and investment environment.

He joined the FT in April 2020 from the Telegraph Media Group, where he had held the position of Europe editor since 2015, focusing on the Brexit negotiation.

He has more than two decades of experience covering global affairs from all sides of the world, based in New Delhi and Beijing, as well as Washington, D.C., where he served as the Telegraph's US editor from 2012. His book, What Went Wrong with Brexit, and What We Can Do About It was published by Canongate in September 2023. Welcome to the podcast, Peter. Thanks, Paul. Welcome back, should we say. I'm going to start a big picture, if I may, and then we'll zoom in, ending up in the end, given your expertise in the current state of EU-UK relations. But big picture start first. So there's now a very well-entrenched narrative that world trade is all over the place, a huge upheaval. and obviously linked that I said in my intro to the activities and the policies,

if you can

call on policy, to the second Trump administration.

But is it fair to say that world trade, as we know it or knew it, was already going through

a difficult phase many, many years before Trump's arrival in the White House, even the

first time?

Yeah, indeed.

I mean, I think, you know, the structural

imbalances of world trade have been growing over time. China runs massive current account

and trade surpluses. That's been upsetting the Americans for a long time. The WTO hasn't been

functioning for a long time. It was Obama who first didn't send a replacement judge to the appellate body,

the decision-making body, albeit for slightly different reasons than Trump, but actually

Biden didn't staff the appellate body. So, you know, Trump has been talking about trade

imbalances himself for 40, 50 years. I think what Trump has done in his second term, which we've seen with these

reciprocal Liberation Day tariffs, is a number of things. The first is just use trade as a sort

of willy-nilly strategic diplomatic weapon. So, you know, Bolsonaro goes to jail in Brazil and he

slaps on 50% tariffs.

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