In the last two decades, with the global financial crisis and then the COVID-19 pandemic, countries began to worry globalization would expose them to too many risks. Nations are turning inward; many are investing in industrial policies, near-shoring, and economic independence instead of the integration and free trade that marked the second half of the 20th century.
Should the world reconsider the case for globalization? What role can trade cooperation play when it comes to clean energy and reducing inequality? And how will growing isolationism affect emerging economies?
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the Director-General of the World Trade Organization, joined FP’s Ravi Agrawal to discuss. Okonjo-Iweala has twice served as Nigeria’s Finance Minister.
After U.S. President Joe Biden’s decision to raise tariffs on electric vehicles imported from China, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala tells FP’s Ravi Agrawal why she’s worried about such protectionist measures.
World Trade Organization head Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala responds to criticism over inefficiencies in that body’s dispute settlement mechanisms.
WTO chief Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala expresses her fears about increasing trade tensions between the United States and China: “Everyone would lose” if the global system fractured into two competing blocs, she says.
As former U.S. President Donald Trump continues to criticize the World Trade Organization, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala makes the case to Americans that globalization and trade have, on the whole, been beneficial: “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.”
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala
Director-general, World Trade Organization
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is the director-general of the World Trade Organization. She is the first woman and the first African to hold this position. She has also twice served as Nigeria’s finance minister and briefly as its foreign minister.
Ravi Agrawal
Editor in chief, Foreign Policy
Ravi Agrawal is the editor in chief of Foreign Policy, the host of FP Live, and a regular world affairs analyst on TV and radio. Before joining FP in 2018, Agrawal worked at CNN for more than a decade in full-time roles spanning three continents, including as the network’s New Delhi bureau chief and correspondent. He is the author of India Connected: How the Smartphone Is Transforming the World’s Largest Democracy.
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