Adam Posen has advice on how to deal with an uneducated, uncooperative country. More precisely: with his home country. “Stand against the USA, give the USA a little nudge, slap the USA if necessary,” is his advice to European politics, including German politics. One example is climate policy, but also foreign trade agreements.
Adam Posen, born in 1966, is an American economist and has been President of the renowned Peterson Institute for International Economics, one of the most important think tanks for international economics, since 2013. At the SZ economic summit in Berlin, he explains that Europe, and especially Germany, is sometimes still too trapped in historical gratitude for the US’s achievements in rebuilding after the Second World War. Although this is not wrong, it should not determine the political dealings with today’s leadership in the country too much.
“The US has acted as if the rules of the game didn’t apply to them for so long,” he says. Now it is time to be more strict with them – although with Joe Biden, of course, there is now a better president in power than the “racist, sexist and fascist Kasper” who was his predecessor. “You shouldn’t overestimate what Biden can actually achieve,” warns the US economist. “And you shouldn’t underestimate the risk that the US will turn back in 2024.”
The US is often a hurdle for progress and reform
His country is deeply fragmented, the likelihood that the Democrats around Biden are already coming Midterm– He estimates that losing the majority in Congress will be extremely high. After that, legislation is hardly possible. And in the next presidential election, Trump will run again if he doesn’t then “die or is in prison, which is what he should be but probably won’t be”. And that the Democrats can win against Trump is not guaranteed. “White women from the suburbs are the key voters,” he says. All other groups of voters have already been determined and the majorities are tight.
At the World Climate Conference, John Kerry, the US special envoy for climate protection, tried to do the right thing. “But the officials from Germany and Europe are confronted with a Biden government that is so afraid of Congress, which is basically afraid of angry white men, that it does not dare, for example, a CO2 tax or other more aggressive ones Introduce instruments to combat climate change. ” There had to be a credible threat from Europe that the EU might take the so-called Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) will introduce a CO2 border adjustment system. The CBAM could hit imports from the US hard. EU importers then have to buy certificates that correspond to the CO2 price that would have been paid if the goods had been manufactured according to EU rules for pricing CO2 emissions.
In the World Trade Organization, too, the US is often a hurdle for progress and reforms, believes Posen. “There are so many problems that you have to wake up the US to.” If necessary with slaps in the face.