Scott Bessent says 19 of the G20 finance ministers agreed to address ‘cheap imports’ but ‘China was the dissenter’

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent used the G20’s finance meeting to make a familiar Trump-era argument: cheap exports distort the world economy, and countries should respond. He said 19 of the group’s members agreed with that view, while China stood apart. His line was blunt. A flood of low-cost exports from “non-market-based economies,” he told reporters, is not sustainable.

The framing matters because Bessent is trying to turn trade friction into a broader warning for other governments. He said he had told G20 counterparts that Trump’s tariff wall would push Chinese goods toward their markets, and that the rest of the world should protect jobs and manufacturing before production gets offshored. That pitch echoed the administration’s long-running case against China’s huge surplus and the U.S. deficit.

There was also a preview of the next round of U.S.-China diplomacy. Bessent said President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping will discuss artificial intelligence later this month, and he argued for more guardrails so “non-state actors” cannot build their own models. He also took a shot at the AI industry, saying data-center builders and labs have done a “horrendous job” explaining themselves to Americans and need to sell the benefits better.

The trade fight is running alongside a legal and political mess of its own. The Trump administration’s tariffs have drawn criticism for lifting costs, and the Tax Foundation said the 2025 measures pushed retail prices for imported consumer goods up by roughly 7% versus pre-tariff trends. The Supreme Court ruled in February that the sweeping global tariffs imposed under an emergency powers law were unconstitutional, even as the White House now considers another 7.5% tariff on Chinese imports.

Bessent also said he found some common ground with his Chinese counterparts on Iran, including that Iran should not get a nuclear weapon and that shipping through the Strait of Hormuz should stay open. Russia’s presence at the meeting remained awkward, with Canadian and European officials openly unhappy about it. Bessent defended the talks anyway. If the sides do not talk, he said, nothing gets solved.