Trade Experts Worry Next President Won't Be Able to Salvage WTO

Trade experts identified many weaknesses of the World Trade Organization -- the evidentiary standard for countervailing duties: the fact that CVD in one market doesn't help the industry's economics when surplus flows to other countries; the length of time it takes to show adverse effects to domestic firms; the fact that 164 countries can't agree on trade liberalization.

Their views on what might happen next, however, diverged. Jennifer Hillman, a former appellate body member at the WTO and Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) senior fellow, said that if all the major players -- Europe, Japan, the U.S., Brazil -- joined together in a broad WTO case against China, it would prevent China from retaliating against one country's firms.

Hillman was speaking on a panel at CFR Oct. 18 on how the China-U.S. trade conflict will affect the global trading system. She said China does respect the WTO, and reformers within China would have their hands strengthened more through a broad WTO case than they have been in the Section 301 dispute.

Charlene Barshefsky, a former U.S. trade representative, said the WTO has become more and more irrelevant, since China is such a major economy but it flouts the letter and the spirit of the rules. She believes that a Trans-Pacific Partnership-like agreement -- or adding the European Union and U.S. to the TPP itself -- is the only way to rebuild a rules-based trading order.

Paul Blustein, a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, said whether the WTO collapses or is revived depends on who the next American president is. But, Blustein said, "With all the other things the administration is going to have to do to repair the damage done domestically [by Trump], are they going to want to invest the political capital" to revive the WTO? "I have my doubts."