Milan, May 13 (LaPresse) – “The United States is finally coming to terms with reality: the tariff policy made no sense and was frighteningly expensive. It also marks a return to healthy multilateralism,” says Jeffrey Sachs, economist at Columbia University and advisor to the last three UN Secretaries-General, in an interview with La Repubblica.
The Geneva shift, he explains, “is entirely due to the competence and rationality of Scott Bessent. Step by step, the Treasury Secretary succeeded in convincing a hardliner like Trump that America doesn’t hold all the cards, can’t act as the uncontested ruler of the world, and shouldn’t follow fanatics like Navarro or Lutnick.”
“This is a historic retreat that goes beyond just the issue of Chinese tariffs: Trump is now called upon to apply the same realism to his relations with Russia, Iran, the Arab world, and China more broadly. Geneva — not a random location — marked the first step toward normalized multilateral relations, I would say toward normality itself.”
Even though the tariff issue is not entirely resolved, “from now on, negotiations will proceed on a more rational basis. What lies ahead is a technically driven approach, a kind of dual management — an unexpected outcome on the eve of the talks, when it seemed that Trump’s arrogance would prevail.”