Trump, Tariffs and Tabbouleh:
Does a Global Trade War Impact Lebanon?
Monday Talk: 5 May 2025
6:45 pm (Beirut Time GMT+3)
Speaker: Riad El-Khoury (English)
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The Talk
Trump reorders the American empire, including
eventual withdrawal from the Eastern Hemisphere, speaking to US isolationism.
Tariffs being pushed up are among his
weapons of choice, including major American trade partners such as China and
the European Union.
Tabbouleh is a quintessentially Lebanese dish,
consumed by all across economic, sectarian and geographic divides. Riad will
begin his analysis by taking the dish as a not-so-serious example of how
the Global Trade War will have little impact on the Lebanese.
Analyzing further, he looks at geopolitics, followed
by political economy, then macroeconomics to conclude that Lebanon will benefit
from the international trade principle of “The Importance of Being
Unimportant.”
Riad is a Jordanian
who advises, lectures, trains and researches on topics including Business, Socio-Economic Development,
Political Economy and Geopolitics, publishing on them and other subjects, as
well as making media contributions. He holds a High School Diploma from l’Ecole
internationale de Genève, a BA majoring in Economics from the American
University of Beirut and an MLitt in the same subject from the University of
Oxford.
Among many other
activities, Riad currently a member of the World Trade Organization Network of
Arab Trainers under which he trains on a range of subjects
including, among others: trade
agreements.
His latest offerings were in this topic were 1)
a course in Riyadh, KSA, for Arab government officials (November 2024) and 2) lectures
in Lebanon to chambers of commerce (January 2025). The latter helped renew my interest
in Lebanese trade in the context of rapidly evolving geopolitics, political
economy and macroeconomics. Link
Click Here for an interesting page on Lebanon is found on this website: Arab Development Portal
