In Milwaukee this week, trade ministers from the world's twenty largest economies will sit across the table from a host nation that has spent the past year rewriting the rules of global commerce. The G20 talks, opening Wednesday, bring together officials from China, India, Russia, Japan, Germany and France at a moment when President Donald Trump's tariff policy has left almost no trading partner untouched. The location is fitting: a city built on manufacturing, in a country now arguing that manufacturing elsewhere has grown unfairly large. The dispute centres on two accusations.

Washington has imposed new tariffs on 60 economies, including China, India and the European Union, over what it calls insufficient action against forced labour. Separately, it is investigating 16 trading partners for industrial overcapacity, a complaint long directed at China but now extended to allies such as Japan and South Korea. US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer insisted on Tuesday that the administration is "not anti-trade," framing the measures as a shared response to global overcapacity and non-market practices rather than an attack on any single country. Few expect that framing to satisfy everyone in the room.

"Don't expect any breakthroughs in Milwaukee," said Josh Lipsky of the Atlantic Council, pointing to Trump's preference for one-on-one deals over multilateral consensus. Wendy Cutler of the Asia Society Policy Institute predicted that some governments would speak bluntly about feeling unfairly targeted by the overcapacity probes, even as they search for ways to keep working with the world's largest economy. Canada and the EU, meanwhile, are expected to use the sidelines to deepen trade ties that bypass Washington altogether. The Supreme Court struck down Trump's earlier country-specific tariffs in February, yet sectoral duties on steel and autos remain, and new measures keep arriving.