Much of the interplay between economic and geopolitical interests plays out not in the trade arena but in the Bretton Woods institutions. Countries’ inability to agree on an institutionalized, closer coordination of macroeconomic policies to reduce global imbalances provides an interesting example. Some observers see the failure to mitigate these imbalances, combined with the return of strategic competition in an era defined by an erosion of trust, as raising a tail-risk possibility of undermining the Bretton Woods institutions themselves and the international rule-based system more generally.