John Maynard Keynes saw today’s trade troubles coming. Back in 1944 at Bretton Woods, he advocated a global trading system that would target persistent imbalances between surplus and deficit countries, rather than policing one-off trade violations. Too bad that’s not what we got.

As the World Trade Organization’s 13th ministerial meeting starts on Monday, I suspect the conversation around trade will continue to be small and technocratic. This misses the core problem, which is that the long-term imbalances between the deficit countries and the surplus nations have created unsustainable economics and politics around the world.

Fixing this requires more than incremental tweaks; it calls for a radical reorganisation of the global trading system. Carnegie Endowment senior fellow and economist Michael Pettis argues for this in a new paper that builds on the ideas in his co-authored 2020 book Trade Wars Are Class Wars.