From my chat with friends on Facebook.
Free trade. Should be. Sans kickass economic and political textbook lingo, let me offer an insight based on history to current geopolitics. Fair trade. Cool.
Yet "unfair" ways such as market dominance and inequality of bargaining power or info control have always been dominated by the West. True, (Scottish) Adam Smith coined the term in the 16th century yet those that refused to join the Western monopoly (British East India Company?) were forced to.
In Asia, we can refer to the two opium wars in China and Admiral Perry's "gunboat diplomacy" in Japan in the 1800s. And per Bretton Woods of 1944 at the tailend of World War II, that market/negotiating dominance was cemented via IMF and World Bank and the U.S. dollar as the world's reserve currency.
In the Middle East, that market rule was laid out via "arms for oil" as integral chips in bilateral agreements (think the Rockefellers and J. Paul Getty, for example). And so when China formally joined WTO in 2001, BRICS was born in 2009, the Arab world "revolted" via Arab Spring (started 2010) and Russia joined WTO in 2012, Western capitalists got super worried.
Add that China's 5 huge state-owned banks balanced IMF etc al and again China gathered 14 Asia Pacific economies and formed the RCEP (Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership) two weeks after Joe Biden won as POTUS in 2020, the West resorted to its old, antiquated tactics to influence trade agreements: Military brinkmanship and proxy war. 💸🏢💸
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