If you are not confused, you clearly aren’t following the political discourse any longer. It is baffling how much rhetoric and reality are falling apart these days, and how little the evening news resembles everyday life.

A basic principle of World Trade Organization (WTO) rules is that there must not be local content requirements. However, from India to Brazil and the US (think of the Inflation Reduction Act) there is hardly a piece of trade legislation coming out these days which isn’t based on local content requirements. While everyone is talking about the importance of the WTO, we are doing everything to undermine it. The WTO might be forgiven for not kicking up a fuss about the blatant disregard of local content rules. Despite the rhetoric about its importance, the WTO is fighting for its very survival. We all love to call for WTO rules when they suit us, but tend to casually ignore them when they turn out not to be to our liking.

International organisations profess to uphold ethical behaviour. At the same time, IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva is among the group’s officials whom law firm WilmerHale found to have instructed researchers to manipulate data to improve China’s standing in the 2018 edition of the eminently useful and now abolished Ease of Doing Business rankings [Ms Georgieva denied any wrongdoing]. Nonetheless, she is still in office.

But the most important example is China. Not a day goes by without someone pontificating about derisking or decoupling from China. Germany’s foreign minister Annalena Baerbock, for example, rarely misses an opportunity to affront China on an open stage. But at the same time, EU imports from China have roughly doubled between 2017 and 2022. There are hardly any Western products without multiple components from China and the country is as important as ever to our national economies. With the enforced move towards electro-mobility, we are systematically increasing — in fact, turbo-charging — Western dependence on China to previously unseen levels.

How can we expect people to take political actors or regulations seriously when there is a growing disconnect between reality and the declared aspirations? This is especially true when there seemingly isn’t even an attempt to bring them back in line.

Martin Kaspar is head of business development at a German Mittelstand company in the automotive industry. E-mail: martin.georg.kaspar@googlemail.com 

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This article first appeared in the December 2023/January 2024 print edition of fDi Intelligence