But in any case, after the 13-year odyssey of the Doha Round, there is no appetite within the WTO for another comprehensive multilateral round. There seems to be a tacit understanding that the multilateral track – and with it, the prospects for a meaningful, comprehensive update of the rule book – are dead, at least for the foreseeable future.

Don’t blame the Director General

The appointment of an energetic, intelligent, and ambitious new Director General (Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala) in 2021 raised hopes that she could jumpstart the moribund organization. That was silly, and a bit unfair to Dr. Okonjo-Iweala. The Director General is a largely powerless administrator with little decision-making authority. All major WTO decisions are taken on a consensus basis by the member economies – and today, there is practically nothing on which those 164 members can unanimously agree. It was almost impossible to get WTO members to agree on the definition of “fish” in the context of the fisheries negotiations. What should we realistically expect on the infinitely more complex task of agreeing new trade rules?

A post-WTO world?

Continuing to expect the WTO to fulfill functions which are beyond its institutional capabilities leads only to lost time. The WTO is simply never going to be able to set and enforce trade rules in the ways we originally expected. Whether we like it or not, it’s time to think about a post-WTO world. This is not to suggest that the WTO will or should disappear. But its role, relevance and influence will remain a fraction of our original expectations.

What might a new post-WTO world look like? One possibility is for already existing trendlines to intensify and accelerate. Countries self-select for closer trade partnerships based on common levels of liberalization ambition and set and enforce their own rules in plurilateral agreements. WTO obligations would constitute the baseline and partners would agree to advance beyond WTO disciplines (or add new ones) according to their interests and needs. The RCEP (Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership) and the CPTPP (Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership) are two recent examples, but the appeal of self-selected plurilateral deals has steadily grown over the years. This approach obviates both the seemingly impossible requirement to secure the unanimous consent of 164 diverse members as well as the dubious fallback of settling for consensus, lowest common-denominator WTO rules that accomplish little. The fastest runners would no longer be held back by the slowest runners, or so the reasoning goes.