Turnberry Is No Bretton Woods: The Myopia of Greer’s Trade Vision

Trump's trade policy centred upon tariffs has naturally upended the global economy; yet listening to the justifications given by various members of the administration, most recently Trade Representative Greer, would indicate that the administration seems to have a very short-sighted view for its trade policy.

In his August 7, 2025 New York Times guest essay, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer draws a bold historical parallel between the “Trump Round” of trade agreements, concluded in part at President Trump’s Turnberry resort, and the 1944 Bretton Woods conference that defined the postwar global economic order. It is an analogy designed to convey world‑shaping significance — but it collapses under scrutiny. Bretton Woods was born in the ashes of a global war, aimed at reconstructing shattered economies and building a durable multilateral framework that would serve shared prosperity for decades. Turnberry, by contrast, emerges in a still-functioning global trading and financial system and represents not a cooperative rebuilding effort, but a unilateral reshaping of that system to fit U.S. short‑term needs, often at the expense of allies and long‑term stability.

Greer’s argument suffers from a persistent selection bias. He highlights examples where tariffs have allegedly yielded market access promises from foreign partners and large‑scale investment pledges into U.S. manufacturing, but he ignores the less flattering consequences: American agricultural exporters who have lost overseas customers after retaliation, U.S. manufacturers facing higher input costs, and global supply chains reorganizing to bypass U.S. tariffs in ways that reduce American leverage over time. By focusing only on apparent “wins” while overlooking the trade‑offs and setbacks, he presents a picture that is incomplete and therefore misleading. This omission extends to the basic question of sustainability. Investment pledges may look impressive in press releases, but history is filled with grand announcements that either faded away, were quietly scaled back, or failed to deliver lasting economic transformation. Treating transactional foreign commitments secured under pressure as evidence of a systemic realignment risks mistaking short‑term bargaining leverage for permanent structural change.

Beneath this framing lies a narrative of the United States as a perpetual victim of the postwar trade order — preyed upon by “free‑trade fundamentalists” at home and manipulative export‑driven economies abroad. What Greer leaves out is that the United States was not merely a participant in this order; it was its primary architect and its principal beneficiary. The Bretton Woods framework, later reinforced by the World Trade Organization’s rules‑based system, enshrined the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve and settlement currency. This gave the United States the “exorbitant privilege” of financing deficits cheaply, running persistent trade shortfalls without triggering a currency collapse, exporting inflation abroad, and attracting international capital into deep and liquid American markets — in both good times and crises. Even as certain industries, especially in manufacturing, lost ground to globalization and technological change, the overall U.S. economy reached unprecedented heights, consumers enjoyed unmatched purchasing power, and American companies dominated global markets across technology, pharmaceuticals, finance, and advanced services. The U.S. remains home to many of the world’s largest and most valuable corporations and leads in innovation, venture capital investment, and wealth creation — including hosting more billionaires than any other nation. These outcomes were built within the very system Greer now dismisses as a decades‑long mistake.

The analogy to Bretton Woods also disintegrates when viewed through the lens of historical purpose and design. In 1944, the global economy was in ruins. American leaders understood that domestic prosperity depended on the prosperity of others, and they used their power to create a cooperative framework to rebuild markets, stabilize currencies, and institutionalize rules to prevent another collapse. The institutions birthed there — the IMF, the World Bank, and eventually the GATT/WTO — bound U.S. leadership to an order that delivered decades of expansion and stability. Turnberry, in contrast, operates in a functioning though imperfect global economy and seeks to disrupt it to benefit immediate U.S. preferences. The agreements struck there are not permanent institutional guardrails but politically contingent bilateral bargains enforced through tariff threats and economic pressure. Where Bretton Woods strengthened the global foundation by deepening mutual interdependence, Turnberry chips away at that foundation in pursuit of transactional wins.

Greer’s portrayal of tariffs as the master key to rebuilding American industrial strength also overstates their power. Long‑term trade and investment patterns are shaped by deeper structural forces — technological innovation, automation, shifting consumer demand, demographic changes, and the growing gravitational pull of markets in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Tariffs may redirect certain trade flows in the short run, but markets adapt. Companies reroute supply chains through untargeted jurisdictions, foreign governments cultivate alternative partnerships, and allies weigh the reliability of U.S. economic leadership more cautiously. If overused, tariff leverage risks diminishing the very advantage it relies on — privileged access to the massive U.S. consumer market — as trading partners find new destinations for their exports and new sources for their imports.

The supposed cause‑and‑effect claims in Greer’s account sidestep economic complexity. To suggest tariffs alone reduced inflation without addressing factors such as monetary policy, energy prices, commodity cycles, currency exchange rates, and global supply-demand imbalances is to compress a multi‑variable phenomenon into a political talking point. Even if tariffs deliver immediate concessions, the medium‑ and long‑term risks are significant: trade fragmentation into competing blocs that exclude the United States, gradual diversification away from the dollar for settlements and reserves, erosion of diplomatic trust, and the long‑term complacency of industries shielded from foreign competition rather than driven to innovate.

What Greer never contends with is that the postwar order did not hollow out U.S. power. It entrenched it. The United States shaped global trade rules to protect its intellectual property, investment standards, and market governance. It attracted top talent from around the world into its universities and industries. Its fiscal capacity, underwritten by global demand for the dollar, financed unparalleled military reach and diplomatic influence. Dismantling that architecture without a credible plan to preserve these privileges is not a strategy — it is a gamble on an untested model whose endurance depends on other nations’ acquiescence rather than on their shared investment in a common system.

Greer’s Turnberry narrative treats unilateral tariffs as the cornerstone of a “new and fair” order, equating the moment with the institutional founding of Bretton Woods. But the two could not be further apart in context, method, or consequence. Bretton Woods built a multilateral structure that tied U.S. prosperity to global stability, ensuring American leadership for eight decades. Turnberry takes a functioning, if flawed, global system and leverages disruption for immediate advantage, with little regard for the slower, subtler erosion of the very monetary and geopolitical privileges that have kept the United States at the center of world affairs. The true measure of economic statecraft is not the quantity of short‑term wins it produces for domestic headlines, but whether it leaves a nation stronger in the long arc of global power relations. By that standard, Turnberry is less the dawn of a new order than the opening chapter of a costly retreat from one that, for all its imperfections, has served American interests remarkably well.

DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of IIPA and this platform.

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Author

Alexander C. Tan is professorial research fellow at the Institute for Indo-Pacific Affairs, and professor of political science and international relations at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand

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