Chris Clague
Amid the chaos of United States President Donald Trump’s trade actions in his first two months in office, one key development has been overlooked. This is that two of the countries most vulnerable to US tariffs – China and Canada – surprisingly requested consultations with the US at the World Trade Organization (WTO) in early February and early March 2025. These requests are the first step in dispute settlement at the WTO. The US accepted both requests on 14 March. However, cheers for the enduring integrity of the global trading system should be withheld. The rules of the WTO are no longer enforceable and have not been since 2019. All sides involved know this, which makes the requests, and their acceptance, indicative of the institution’s long slide into irrelevance – the equivalent of institutional death.
A mix of American hostility and indifference
Since December 2019, when the first Trump administration blocked new appointments to the WTO’s Appellate Body, leaving it unable to review appeals due to a lack of members, the WTO has been moribund, albeit with occasional flickers of life. There were, for example, various proposals from European members and others to reform the overall dispute-settlement system – the organisation’s ‘crown jewel’. The WTO General Council was tasked with building consensus for reform. As of the end of 2024, however, progress towards a resolution of the various disagreements between members had been halting. The chairperson of the reform process in 2024 and Norway’s ambassador to the WTO, Petter Ølberg, concluded in his December report that ‘the majority of Members have indicated that their interests are best served by the key features of the current system without fundamental changes to them’.
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