ExclusiveHamid Mamdouh: US, China urged by WTO hopeful to avoid ‘old traps of cold war and rivalry’
- Hamid Mamdouh, Egypt’s nominee to lead the World Trade Organisation, says state business ‘subsidies run against the basic grain of the system’
- ‘There has always been the perception that you need a politician at the top of the WTO. I fundamentally disagree,’ the technocratic outsider says
Hamid Mamdouh, the Egyptian candidate to head the World Trade Organisation (WTO), has warned the United States and China against “falling back into old traps of cold war and rivalry”, as rising geopolitical tensions threaten to upend the global trade system.
The experienced Mamdouh, considered an outsider for the director general position with the Geneva-based body, said that both sides – as well as other trading nations – benefit from strong commercial ties and should try to “disentangle the trade part a bit, if you cannot completely separate it, but distinguish it because this is perhaps an area where you might end up with win-win outcomes, as opposed to mixing it with all other geopolitical tensions”.
The increased level of globalisation since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, however, means this “new cold war” risks disrupting global trade even more than the last one.
“That distinction [between trade and geopolitics] was very easy to make in the past because they weren’t intertwined, but now they are. And what we’re dealing with is conflicting national interests. That’s the brutal reality,” Mamdouh said in an interview with the South China Morning Post.
“So, how can we update our approach and our thinking to suit the new reality? Or are we going to fall back into old traps of cold war and rivalry without actually having a deeper look at the situation and see how we can minimise damages of conflicts?”