World leaders must work together to solve today’s pressing problems or risk sleepwalking to disaster, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Wednesday.
She said it was far from clear that the lessons of the last century and its two World Wars had been learned.
“We think that shutting ourselves off from the rest of the world, isolating ourselves will not lead us into a good future. Protectionism is not the answer,” she said in a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
“We believe that if we are of the opinion that things are simply not fair, that there is no reciprocity, then we have to seek multilateral answers to this and not pursue a unilateral protectionist course where we isolate ourselves against the other.”
President Trump, who has already pulled America out of the Paris accord on climate change and ditched a Pacific trade deal he blasted as unfair, is due to address the same audience on Friday.