#OpenDialogue 15 July 2025 Trade Systems in Crisis: Fragmentation and Failed Promises
Part 2 in the Series “Aid, Trade, Philanthropy in a Senterej Moment”
“The world after the storm feels like a game whose rules no one quite remembers. We’re living in the interregnum, that Gramscian twilight where the old order is fading, the new refuses to be born, and everyone seems to be playing by different rules.” — Gerry Salole
The global convergence of aid cuts, escalating trade conflicts, and philanthropic sector pressures creates an unprecedented crisis demanding urgent cross-sector dialogue and coordinated action. In collaboration with Lucy Bernholz and Blueprint 2026 this is a three-part special investigation dialogue series examining the unprecedented convergence of aid cuts, trade wars, and philanthropic sector pressures that is reshaping global cooperation.
It will explore the interconnected crises of aid decline and trade fragmentation and reflect on responses to the challenge these bring to philanthropy to confront its role and responsibilities in this fractured landscape. Beginning with the immediate impacts of aid retrenchment, then exploring how trade wars exacerbate development challenges, and culminating in a critical examination of philanthropy’s role, this series offers a framework for understanding how these systems interact and how philanthropy must transform to address them effectively.
Fragmentation & Failed Promise(s): Trade Systems in Crisis 🌍
“The world after the storm feels like a game whose rules no one quite remembers. We’re living in the interregnum, that Gramscian twilight where the old order is fading, the new refuses to be born, and everyone seems to be playing by different rules.” — Gerry Salole
📅 Date: July 15th, 2025
⏰ Time: 3.30 PM GMT / 4.30 PM CET / SAST / 10.30 AM ET / 7.30 AM PST
🔗 Register for the zoom link
As we navigate what Gerry Salole calls “the Senterej moment” – where old rules are crumbling and new ones emerge in real-time – the intersection of aid cuts and trade wars is creating unprecedented challenges for the world’s most vulnerable communities.
The Convergent Crises: Aid, Trade, Philanthropy and Peace Collapse
Recent ODI analysis reveals countries facing massive aid cuts are simultaneously hit by escalating tariffs. The Global Peace Index 2025 shows this isn’t just economic disruption, it’s peace architecture collapse.
Today’s tariff wars exemplify how economic, and security concerns are becoming increasingly intertwined – the weaponisation of economic interdependence that historically prevented conflict. We’re witnessing the deliberate decoupling of financial cooperation from peace-building, just as:
- 67 countries (including India, Brazil, Mexico, Kenya) now run trade deficits against 15 mercantilist nations
- Aid cuts remove $60 billion while 27% US tariffs (highest in a century) hit the same vulnerable economies
- Military spending reaches $2.7 trillion while peacebuilding investment falls to just $47.2 billion (0.52% of military budgets)
Trade expert Lori Wallach’s pre-dialogue insights reveal the systemic nature: Germany, with the world’s highest trade-to-GDP ratio at 41%, sees working-class living standards decline despite massive export success. The current system “isn’t working particularly well for anyone… north, south, large country, small country.”
The Parallel Power Systems: Financial Vehicles for Control
Lucy Bernholz’s insight from our first dialogue Resilience Beyond Aid resonates deeply: “institutional philanthropic foundations are financial vehicles for rich people. That’s what they are.” But this critique extends beyond philanthropy. As Wallach’s analysis reveals, both aid and trade function as financial vehicles for mercantilist nations – the 15 countries maintaining surpluses while 67 nations run deficits. For example, US Aid buys $2 billion from Midwest farmers to ‘help’ Africa. German export surpluses reaching 41% of GDP while German workers see declining living standards. These aren’t bugs in the system – they’re features. Just as philanthropy allows wealthy individuals to maintain power while appearing generous, aid and trade systems allow dominant nations to extract wealth while claiming to promote development and cooperation. The current crisis isn’t just about policy failures; it’s about recognizing these interconnected systems for what they truly are: mechanisms for maintaining global hierarchies of wealth and power.
Why This Dialogue Matters Now
We’re not just witnessing separate crises – we’re seeing the systematic dismantling of post-WWII international cooperation architecture. The convergence creates what development economists call a “systemic risk multiplier” where trade disputes reduce fiscal space for aid, aid cuts heighten dependence on problematic funding, and communities face compounded vulnerabilities.
Crisis may create opportunity. As our first dialogue showed, the most innovative solutions are emerging from communities who’ve learned to “play Senterej” – responding to chaos with rapid, simultaneous adaptation rather than slow, deliberate chess moves.
This dialogue will explore, collectively, the responses, frameworks and pathways for understanding how these systems interconnect and insights from communities already building alternatives that transcend traditional aid-trade dependencies.
Join the Conversation on July 15th at 3.30pm UK / 10.30pm ET / 7.30pm PST
📅 Date: July 15th, 2025
⏰ Time: 3.30 PM GMT / 4.30 PM CET / SAST / 10.30 AM ET / 7.30 AM PST
🔗 Register for the zoom link
Part 2 of the Impact Trust Open Dialogue ‘Senterej Moment’ Series with Blueprint exploring Aid, Trade, and Philanthropy in an age of fracture and simultaneous change.
Conversation guides Dialogue Two
Tom Kruse is program director for the global challenges portion of the Democratic Practice program of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. He joined the Fund in June 2008 to manage the development and direction of the global governance grantmaking, including the formation of the program objectives, strategies, and initiatives.
Prior to joining the Fund, Mr. Kruse served as an advisor to the Bolivian government on trade and investment policy, the continuation of trade preference programs, and debt relief. In that capacity, Mr. Kruse worked closely with the Bolivian government and its diplomatic missions, members of the Bolivian business community, international financial institutions, and several RBF grantees that provide technical assistance to developing country governments.
His career in Bolivia began in 1994 when he served as director of the School for International Training’s programs in Bolivia, and as a consultant on geographic information systems for the Centre of Population Studies. Mr. Kruse later led research teams on labour conditions in formal and informal sector shoe and apparel industries and co-founded a labour education project that organized and carried out courses of study linked to organizing drives. Subsequently, he served as program director at a prominent research and policy advocacy organization that served as the Bolivia chapter of the Social Watch global network. In that position, he introduced and consolidated macroeconomic analysis on the fiscal limits of poverty reduction spending; and contributed to the consolidation of citizens and social organization coalitions on debt and development finance, and fair trade and investment.
Mr. Kruse holds a Master of Regional Planning from Cornell University and a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Arizona.
Lori Wallach is the director of the Rethink Trade program at American Economic Liberties Project. She is also Senior Advisor to the Citizens Trade Campaign, the U.S. national trade justice coalition of unions and environmental, consumer, faith, family farm and other groups.
Wallach, a 30-year veteran of international and U.S. congressional trade battles starting with the 1990s fights over NAFTA and WTO, has an encyclopaedic knowledge of trade pacts, policies, outcomes, and politics. She was named to “Politico’s 50” list of thinkers, doers, and visionaries transforming American politics for her leadership in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) debate. She is an internationally recognized expert on trade with experience advocating in Congress and foreign parliaments, trade negotiations, courts, government agencies, the media, and in the streets. Dubbed “the Trade Debate’s Guerrilla Warrior” in a National Journal profile and “Ralph Nader with a sense of humour” in a Wall Street Journal profile, Wallach combines a lawyer’s expertise on the terms and outcomes of agreements with insight from the front lines of trade debates. Wallach’s specialty is translating arcane trade issues into accessible language.
A lawyer who has worked in television news and on political campaigns, Wallach has testified on TPP, WTO, China trade, NAFTA, Fast Track, and other globalization issues before 30 congressional committees and appeared as a trade commentator on MSNBC, Fox, CNN, ABC, Bloomberg, PBS, NPR, and numerous foreign outlets. She has been published and quoted in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Financial Times, Foreign Policy, The Economist, Forbes, USA Today, and more. She is currently focused on the dangerous Big Tech “digital trade” ploy to lock in their monopoly powers and evade regulation, supply chain disasters caused by decades of hyper-globalisation and corporate concentration, and the trade-pact-enforced monopolies limiting the supply of vaccines needed to end the pandemic.
Books Wallach has written on trade include The Rise and Fall of Fast Track Trade Authority (2013) and Whose Trade Organization? A Comprehensive Guide to the WTO (2004). In 1991, she began Public Citizen’s trade program, founding its Global Trade Watch division in 1995 and directing it for 26 years. Wallach was a founder of the Citizens Trade Campaign, the U.S. national coalition representing more than 11 million Americans, and serves on its board. Wallach is a native of Wisconsin, graduated from Wellesley College and Harvard Law School, and now spends much of her time in Washington, D.C.
Lebohang Liepollo Pheko is an activist scholar, public intellectual, international movement builder, a sister, a daughter, a partner, a parent, a neighbour and is daily striving to be a good ancestor. Pheko’s work is grounded in intersectional race, class and feminist analysis and she is committed to grounding academic research in community struggles & praxis.
In recent years, she has substantially contributed to framing policy alternatives that centre African countries in post-COVID economic recovery. She is also a member of the Walter and Patricia Rodney Commission on Reparations and is the leading South African chapter on the political economy of reparations. Furthermore, Pheko is currently reassessing Wellbeing Economics, Feminist Wellbeing Economics and the interaction of Feminist Economics with decoloniality and decolonial economic theories. She has completed several significant studies in this regard in recent years, examining South Africa, Malawi, Vietnam and Indonesia. She has contributed to over 100 global conferences and delivered several papers at those fora.
Pheko is the Senior Research Fellow at an advocacy think tank – Trade Collective and has taught International Trade, Afrikan Feminist Theory, International Development, Political Economy, Political theory and Race and Decolonial studies at institutions in the UK, the US, Sweden, Germany and several South African universities. She is also an ambassador of the Well Being Economy Global Alliance, member of the Global Tapestry of Alternatives, an African Futures Fellow and a member of South Feminist Futures. Pheko is a sought-after international speaker, media commentator, process facilitator and technical adviser and has lived and worked across 46 countries to date. During the 25th hour of the day, she takes slow jogs and long hikes, listens to healing music across genres, reads poems, and pursues the elusive art of stillness.
Jodie Keane is a Principal Research Fellow with the International Economic Development Group at ODI. She leads the climate, trade, and development workstream, focusing on navigating new green trade measures and other related policy spillovers, greening trade and supply chains, and developing resilient value chains. Her areas of interest also include technology transfer, critical minerals, carbon markets, and more broadly, the interaction between the climate-trade nexus.
Jodie is a seasoned trade and development economist and project manager, having worked with most international organisations and multiple governments across the developed and developing world over the past 15 years. This includes dedicated support within a multilateral context for World Trade Organization (WTO) members related to the future of aid for trade to Least Developed Countries (LDCs).
Jodie began her career in Vietnam and Cambodia working on various assignments including non-market economy issues for the World Bank (2006) in Hanoi and Cambodia (2007) with a local consultancy. Subsequently, she joined the (formerly known as) Overseas Development Institute in 2007 as a research officer, supporting the Director of Programmes on changing EU-ACP relations. In 2012, she progressed to Research Fellow, spearheading workstreams on trade and climate change and Global Value Chains.
Between 2015 and 2020, Jodie was an economic adviser within the Trade, Oceans and Natural Resources Directorate of the Commonwealth Secretariat (2015-2020), with responsibility for global advocacy on emerging trade issues and supporting global architecture. She delivered specific assignments ahead of the 2018 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting on LDCs, and Graduation and Overcoming Services Barriers (in collaboration with the City of London). She also supported the Commonwealth Trade Reviews 2015 and 2018.
She holds a PhD in economics from SOAS University of London, specialising in comparative value chain studies) and has taught seminars on Comparative Economic Growth in Africa and Asia (SOAS), and more recently, the Political Economy of Trade at the Department of International Relations, London School of Economics. Additionally, she has published extensively in journals and book chapters, and edited volumes on global value chains and LDCs. Her expertise has been featured in several media outlets including the Financial Times, Monocle, The Guardian, The Conversation UK, among others.
