Greer hosts the G20 trade ministers this week with conditional most favored nation treatment on the agenda, a steel overcapacity ministerial bolted to the front of it, and the memory of a finance track that could not agree a communique four weeks ago.
MILWAUKEE, Sept. 28, 2026 – United States Trade Representative Jamieson Greer opens three days of G20 trade diplomacy here on Tuesday evening, with an agenda that asks the world’s largest economies to reconsider the foundational rule of the multilateral trading system.
The ministerial proper runs Wednesday and Thursday. According to the USTR travel advisory issued Sept. 25, discussions will focus on “eliminating forced labor in global supply chains, updating the Most-Favored Nation (MFN) principle, denouncing the weaponization of trade in food, and addressing structural excess capacity and production.”
The second of those four items is the one that matters. Most favored nation treatment, the obligation to extend any trade concession granted to one member to all members, is the first article of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the organizing principle of eighty years of trade law. The United States is asking the G20 to open it.
The week’s schedule
The USTR release sets out an unusually corporate program.
Tuesday evening opens with a welcome reception hosted by the Business Roundtable and the National Association of Manufacturers, from 6 to 8 p.m.
Wednesday begins early with a Global Forum on Steel Excess Capacity ministerial from 8 to 10 a.m., followed by a tour of Rockwell Automation from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., the G20 Trade Ministerial opening session from 3 to 5:30 p.m., and a welcome dinner hosted by USTR and the Department of Agriculture.
Thursday runs the ministers’ meeting from 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m., a press conference from 2 to 2:30 p.m., a further session from 2:30 to 5:30 p.m., and a closing reception at the Harley-Davidson Museum.
On the Rockwell visit, the USTR release says Greer and the ministers “will meet with blue-collar workers and industry leaders to discuss how President Trump’s trade program is accelerating America’s reindustrialization.”
The choice of Milwaukee, of a factory floor, of a motorcycle museum and of two manufacturing trade associations as reception hosts is not incidental. This is a ministerial staged as an argument.
One scheduling note: USTR’s earlier announcements, in May and August, gave the dates as Sept. 30 and Oct. 1. The Sept. 25 advisory adds the Tuesday reception, making it effectively a three-day event with two days of formal sessions.
The MFN proposal, in the administration’s own words
The United States has put its position on paper. A USTR document titled “US Further Perspectives on WTO Reform,” published in March 2026 ahead of the WTO’s fourteenth Ministerial Conference, argues that members “need to rethink how the MFN principle functions in its current form, and whether it genuinely fosters openness and a level playing field.”
The paper proposes that MFN status “may be adjusted or made conditional based on various factors, including but not limited to market openness and a commitment to fair, market-oriented competition and transparency.” It also urges members to “explore options so that they can more easily adjust their tariffs in response to threats to their economies, including from countries that run persistent and large surpluses or drive imbalances by building and maintaining overcapacity.”
Read plainly, that is a proposal to make the most basic obligation in trade law contingent on a member’s conduct, assessed by its trading partners.
Greer put the case more bluntly at the Yaoundé ministerial in March 2026, describing the current system as “economically unworkable and politically unacceptable” and saying MFN “failed to promote reciprocity within the trade system,” according to Al Jazeera’s reporting from the conference.
A second Greer line from his message to that conference explains why this week’s meeting is happening in Milwaukee rather than Geneva. On excess capacity, he wrote that “the WTO is not able to address those issues. That important work will happen elsewhere.”
This is the elsewhere.
The opposition, also on the record
The March conference produced the counter-arguments, and they came from allies as well as adversaries.
Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao said MFN must remain the “bedrock” of global trade and warned that differentiated treatment would open a “Pandora’s box,” according to Al Jazeera.
European Union Trade Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič took a middle position, signalling interest in “a more flexible framework of rules” built around country-group agreements, which puts Brussels closer to Washington on China than on the principle itself.
United Kingdom Trade Minister Chris Bryant warned of a “disorderly collapse of the WTO and some people writing a new rulebook.”
The most pointed critique came from James Bacchus, a Cato Institute adjunct scholar and former chairman of the WTO Appellate Body, writing in March 2026. “Jettisoning MFN would be by far the worst of all the disruptions of international trade rules instigated by an administration that has upended normal trading relationships globally,” he wrote. His argument turns on reciprocity of defection: “The MFN principle is built upon trust. If one country abandons it, others have a strong incentive to follow suit. What results is an endless exchange of protectionist trade measures that weaken economic growth and raise prices.” Legitimate concerns about Chinese practices, he added, “can be addressed under existing WTO rules without abandoning the basic WTO principle.”
There is a measurable version of that worry. WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala noted in September 2025 that the share of world trade conducted on MFN terms had fallen from roughly 80 percent to 72 percent, saying at the time that “we’re experiencing the largest disruption to global trade rules, unprecedented in the past 80 years.” That figure is a year old and has almost certainly moved further.
Steel: the agenda item with actual numbers
The Global Forum on Steel Excess Capacity ministerial that opens Wednesday is the part of the week most likely to produce agreed text, because it involves a smaller and more like-minded group. The Forum’s own materials describe 28 members across six continents working on collective solutions to global excess capacity.
The numbers are large and moving the wrong way. The OECD Steel Outlook 2026, released in June, put global steelmaking capacity at 2.445 billion metric tonnes in 2025 against excess capacity of 640 million tonnes, a figure that already exceeds total OECD steel production by more than 200 million tonnes. The OECD projects excess capacity reaching 745 million tonnes by 2028, with as much as 138.8 million tonnes of planned additions still to come. Capacity utilisation stood at 76 percent in 2025 and is projected to fall to 74 percent or lower by 2028. Global steel consumption fell 2.6 percent in 2025, with Chinese demand down 6.9 percent.
The OECD’s headline finding is that subsidies in non-OECD producing economies are increasingly undermining fair competition.
The American answer to that has been Section 232. Following a proclamation effective April 6, 2026, primary steel, aluminum and copper articles face a 50 percent duty on the full customs value, reduced to 10 percent where United States smelted or cast inputs are used. Derivative products of mixed composition face 25 percent, or 10 percent with American inputs. The United Kingdom pays 25 percent rather than 50 percent. Russian aluminum faces 200 percent. Articles with under 15 percent metal content by weight are exempt.
The methodological change in that proclamation is the significant one for importers: duties now apply to the full customs value of the imported product rather than only to the metal content value. That single drafting decision multiplied the effective burden on derivative goods far more than any rate change.
The forced labor item, and the awkwardness attached to it
The first agenda item is eliminating forced labor in global supply chains, and the United States arrives with the most aggressive instrument any member has deployed.
In July 2026 USTR imposed Section 301 duties on 60 economies for failing to prohibit or effectively enforce prohibitions on imports made with forced labor. The structure is 10 percent for economies that have committed to adopting or enforcing a prohibition, and 12.5 percent for those that have not, applied across trading partners representing 99.4 percent of American imports by USTR’s own accounting.
The scale of the underlying problem is not in dispute. The International Labour Organization estimated in March 2024 that 27.6 million people were in forced labour on any given day, generating $236 billion in annual illegal profits, up 37 percent since 2014. ILO Director-General Gilbert Houngbo said at the time that “forced labour perpetuates cycles of poverty and exploitation and strikes at the heart of human dignity.”
American labor and industry backed the action. United Steelworkers International President Roxanne Brown said “strong enforcement against forced labor protects workers abroad while helping ensure that American manufacturers and workers compete on a level playing field.” International Association of Machinists President Brian Bryant said “forced labor has no place in the global economy. Companies and countries that profit from exploitation should not be rewarded with access to the U.S. market.” American Iron and Steel Institute President Kevin Dempsey and Nucor Chair and Chief Executive Leon Topalian offered similar endorsements. Those statements were collected and distributed by USTR itself, which is worth noting.
The awkwardness is that the tariffs are in court. Twenty-five states led by Oregon, along with small-business importers, are challenging the action at the Court of International Trade, with oral argument scheduled for Wednesday, the same day Greer convenes the forced labor discussion in Milwaukee. The states argue the forced labor rationale was pretextual and that USTR’s own report identified only three specific forced-labor products across all 60 economies.
Foreign governments have made the same point in comments. The European Union said in July that it “fully reject[s] the notion that the EU could be considered as contributing to the global problem of forced labor.” Canada’s submission stated that “there is no basis for the imposition of additional Section 301 duties on Canadian goods.”
Several of the ministers at the table in Milwaukee represent economies currently paying those duties. That is the subtext of Wednesday’s first session.
The likely outcome, based on four weeks ago
The best guide to what Milwaukee produces is what Asheville produced.
On Sept. 1, 2026, under this same American G20 presidency, the finance ministers’ meeting in Asheville, North Carolina failed to agree a joint communique. According to Axios, China objected to four sections covering Strait of Hormuz and conflict language, global imbalances and export reliance, greater IMF scrutiny of economies, and sovereign debt restructuring. All 19 other members supported the disputed language. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent issued a chair’s statement instead, naming the dissent, and remarked that “I do think it is incredible to get 19 countries to agree to anything.”
There is longer precedent. G20 trade ministers failed to issue a joint statement in 2023 when Russia and China opposed Ukraine language, and the finance track failed in 2022.
A consensus communique endorsing conditional MFN is implausible. China called the concept a Pandora’s box in March and has blocked far less contentious text since. The realistic outcomes are a chair’s statement from Greer that records where agreement was not reached, and possibly a separate Global Forum statement on steel, which is a smaller room with a narrower question.
Context: an American presidency with a narrowed agenda
The United States assumed the G20 presidency under unusual circumstances. It boycotted the Johannesburg leaders’ summit in November 2025 entirely, and the handover became a diplomatic incident when South Africa declined to transfer the presidency to a United States Embassy representative.
The Council on Foreign Relations, citing Distinguished Senior Fellow James M. Lindsay in December 2025, reported that the administration narrowed the G20 agenda to three priorities: removing regulatory burdens, unlocking affordable and secure energy supply chains, and pioneering new technologies and innovation, dropping climate, development and sustainability. Elizabeth Sidiropoulos of the South African Institute of International Affairs argued in the same piece that the narrowed focus “fails to recognize the skewed structural global financial rules that undermine development finance.”
The leaders’ summit is scheduled for Dec. 14 and 15 at Trump National Doral in Miami. Trump announced in November 2025 that South Africa would not be invited, citing its treatment of Afrikaners and the handover dispute. Whether that exclusion extends to ministerials such as this one is not something USTR has addressed publicly.
Attendance in Milwaukee has not been published. India’s Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal is confirmed. No boycott or downgrade has been reported by any member.
The food weaponization item
The third agenda item, denouncing the weaponization of trade in food, is the least documented of the four. USTR has published no position paper elaborating it, and the March WTO reform document does not address it at all.
The plausible referents are not hard to guess. China has repeatedly used agricultural purchasing as a policy instrument, halting and resuming American soybean and sorghum buying in step with the state of negotiations, and its export licensing on critical minerals follows the same logic in the other direction. Russia’s conduct around Black Sea grain corridors is the other obvious candidate. Neither government is named in any USTR document on the subject.
The item is worth watching for a structural reason. Two of the four Milwaukee agenda items, forced labor and food weaponization, have no backing in the American WTO reform paper, which covers MFN, notification compliance, special and differential treatment, plurilaterals, Secretariat governance and security exceptions. That gap suggests the Milwaukee agenda was assembled for this forum rather than carried over from Geneva, and that the administration sees the G20 as a venue for arguments the WTO process cannot accommodate.
What Milwaukee is being asked to do that Geneva could not
The fourteenth WTO Ministerial Conference in Yaoundé in March produced the confrontation described above and little else. Greer’s judgment that excess capacity work “will happen elsewhere” was a statement of fact about that institution as much as a statement of intent.
The structural problem is familiar. The Appellate Body has been non-functional for years because of American refusal to fill vacancies, which means the dispute settlement system that gave MFN its teeth no longer bites. A rule that cannot be enforced becomes a norm, and a norm that a large member openly questions becomes optional.
That is the context in which the share of world trade conducted on MFN terms has been falling. Whether one reads the American proposal as the cause of that erosion or as a response to it depends largely on where one starts, and both readings have honest adherents.
What Milwaukee can plausibly do is smaller than resolving any of this. It can put conditional MFN into the record as a proposal that a G20 host has formally advanced, which changes the baseline for every subsequent conversation. It can produce a steel statement from a narrower group. And it can demonstrate, to a domestic audience in a manufacturing state, that trade ministers came to a factory floor in Wisconsin.
What this means for American businesses
Three practical readings.
First, the MFN proposal is a long-horizon risk that exporters should start thinking about now. If conditional MFN gains traction, the reciprocal logic runs both ways: other members can condition their treatment of American goods on assessments of American conduct. Exporters whose market access currently rests on the MFN floor rather than on a free trade agreement are the exposed class.
Second, the steel numbers say the Section 232 regime is not going anywhere. With OECD projecting overcapacity rising to 745 million tonnes by 2028 and utilisation falling, the factual predicate for the metals tariffs is strengthening rather than weakening. Importers of derivative products should plan on the full-customs-value methodology persisting and should be auditing metal content percentages against the 15 percent de minimis threshold.
Third, watch the chair’s statement rather than the press conference. If Greer’s statement names specific dissents, as Bessent’s did in Asheville, the named issues are the ones the administration intends to pursue bilaterally or unilaterally rather than through the G20. That is the most useful forward indicator the week will produce.
A note on what has not been reported
Two things are worth stating precisely because the absence of information is itself part of the picture.
No attendee list for the ministerial has been published beyond India’s confirmation. That is unusual this close to a meeting, and it means nobody outside the participating governments currently knows how many ministers rather than deputies will be in the room. Seniority of attendance is the standard diplomatic signal, and it will not be readable until the sessions begin.
No boycott, downgrade or formal objection has been reported by any member. Given the Johannesburg handover dispute and South Africa’s exclusion from the Miami summit, the question of South Africa’s status at ministerials under this presidency is an open one that USTR has not addressed. Nothing available supports a claim that anyone is staying away.
Coverage of the ministerial has also been thin to the point of near-absence outside USTR’s own releases, which is itself notable for a G20 meeting hosted by the United States. That may change once the sessions start and the press conference is held Thursday afternoon.
The larger question
There is a coherent case for what the United States is attempting here. The MFN principle was designed for a system of broadly comparable market economies, and it does not obviously handle a member whose industrial capacity is state-directed and whose surpluses are structural. Greer’s observation that the WTO cannot address excess capacity is, as a description of the institution’s current capability, accurate. The Appellate Body has not functioned for years.
There is also a coherent case against, and Bacchus makes it: the MFN principle is a coordination device held together by mutual expectation, and a large member that treats it as conditional invites every other member to do the same. What follows is not a better-calibrated system but no system.
What Milwaukee will not do is resolve that. The realistic function of this week is to demonstrate that a forum exists outside Geneva where the United States can convene the conversation on its own terms, in a manufacturing city, on a factory floor, with the steel numbers on the table. Whether anyone follows is a question for Miami in December, and for the years after it.