A cargo ship docks at the Qingdao Port, Shandong province. (PHOTO: XINHUA)

By TANG Zhexiao

As the world's largest economy and a major global trader, the U.S. is a principal beneficiary of trade liberalization, which means it should set a good example by abiding by the rules and honoring its commitments in the multilateral trading system.

Although benefitting greatly from trade liberalization, it has become a destroyer of the multilateral trading system.

Since pursuing the policy of "America First," the U.S. has been flouting WTO rules and the expectations of other members, as well as resorting to unilateralism, protectionism and bullying hegemonism, which harmed the global community's shared interest, said a report on WTO Compliance of the U.S.

The fact is that decoupling has not brought manufacturing back to the U.S. as expected.

Instead, Americans are paying the imposed additional tariffs. Data shows that the Trump -Biden tariffs currently cover about two-thirds of all imports from China, at an average rate of nearly 20 percent.

According to a recent research published on Annual Review of Economics, compared to the infamous 1930 Smoot -Hawley Tariff Act, a law that implemented protectionist trade policies in the U.S., tariffs and retaliation make up an even larger share of GDP.

It indicates that both companies and households need to pay more for the products at a time of high inflation to the extent covered by tariffs.

Applying different standards, it also adopted strong hi-tech industrial policies to impede the industrial development of others which may compete with it.

The CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 comes with strong "guardrails," requiring recipients of federal financial assistance to sign a ten-year agreement on the condition of not engaging in any significant transaction involving the material expansion of semiconductor manufacturing capacity in China or any other "foreign country of concern."

Gina M. Raimondo, the U.S. Secretary of Commerce, stated publicly in February 2023 that she hoped the U.S. would be the only country in the world where every company capable of producing leading-edge chips would have a significant R&D and high-volume 10 manufacturing presence.

For the world, decoupling and fragmenting industrial and global supply chains instigated by the U.S. does not enhance the resilience of that, but makes them more vulnerable and even fragmented, said the report.

The fragmentation would in turn lead to a loss of global economic efficiency, said South China Morning Post, adding that it could lower global real domestic product by 5.4 percent, with developing countries being hit almost twice as hard as developed countries, the WTO economists estimated.

Long before the COVID-19 pandemic, the Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies were already bringing about a reorganization of global value chains involving significant relocation of production, said Rebeca Grynspan, Secretary-General of United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, noting that, "The resilience and dependability of production have become more important."

The restrictive measures taken by the U.S. against others are not good for the U.S., or even the rest of the world. Maybe it's time for the U.S. to stop being a bullying hegemonist and play a greater role in global supply chains to advance the multilateral trading system.