Can The WTO Survive Trump?

The U.S. president’s trade rampage has shaken a pillar of the rules-based postwar economic order

- Bryce Baschuk

America’s longest-serving secretary of state, Cordell Hull, is best known for winning the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in establishing the United Nations at the end of World War II. Today, 75 years later, another important piece of his legacy looks increasingly at risk as President Donald Trump realigns the U.S.’s relationships across the globe.

Hull helped create the modern global trading system that eventually led to the advent of the World Trade Organization in 1995. He viewed tariff battles as a threat to international peace and advocated for unconditional trade liberalization among nations. Indeed, he considered barriers to the exchange of goods and unfair economic competition as synonymous with war.

Hull’s vision is running aground on the shores of Lake Geneva at the WTO’s headquarters in Switzerland. Under Trump, the U.S. is weaponizing tariffs and has effectively neutralized the organization’s dispute- settlement function at the very moment when global trade arbitration is needed most.

Some economic historians fear that the new chapter of rising protectionism has led to an existential moment for the WTO. “Cordell Hull would be fretting over the state of the debate,” says Douglas Irwin, an economist at Dartmouth College whose book Free Trade Under Fire is being updated for 2020. “He would be very concerned about the deterioration of the WTO system, as he worked hard to replace a power-politics, law-of-the-jungle approach to trade in the 1930s with the rule-of-law approach that was capstoned in his time.”

Hull’s beliefs helped pave the way for Western nations to sign the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or GATT, in 1947. The accord sought to lower import duties and was an unparalleled success. Setting the rules for world trade, it reduced average tariff levels among its participants to 5%, from more than 20%, over its lifetime.