Last month, while the 30th anniversary of the WTO was being feted at headquarters in Geneva, Representative Tom Tiffany introduced a resolution in the US Congress that America should leave the Organization. This is not the first time such a proposition has been put to Congress-for instance, Bernie Sanders co-sponsored a similar resolution in 2005. The current proposal comes at a time when the trade policies of the Trump Administration have emerged in a form that, at first glance, can seem like a frontal attack on the basic principles of the WTO system, most obviously MFN and, closely related, the concept of legally bound rates of tariff (subject to certain defined exceptions). In these circumstnaces, the deliberations in Congress will have an immediacy and gravity that, arguably, go beyond previous such exercises, all of which failed, obviously.
The context and history are well-summarized by William Reinsch:
The opportunity presents itself via a provision of the 1995 Uruguay Round Agreements Act that requires the U.S. Trade Representative to submit a report every five years on the United States’ participation in the WTO, and, following submission of the report, provides a 90-day window for members of Congress to introduce a resolution calling for withdrawal from the WTO. The resolution is privileged, which means its author can get a vote on it 45 days after it is introduced.
The report that Reinsch refers to is contained Section V of the 2025 Trade Policy Agenda and 2024 Annual Report, released this February. The document notably does not advocate US withdrawal from the WTO but rather what might be described as watchful waiting to see if the Organizations ills are terminal or can be fixed.
Big Ag and Big Food have been quick out of the gate in urging congressional leaders to reject the resolution for WTO withdrawal. The Trump Administration, perhaps in anticipation of the resolution passing, has suspended the payment of US dues to the Organization. In Trump 1, when the Administration was also toying with leaving the WTO, the neoliberal Peterson Institute deployed its usual scaremongering rhetoric to claim that “US Exit From the WTO Would Unravel World Trade.”
Now that Trump 2 has (from the Peterson Institute perspective) already unraveled world trade, what do they have left to say against the US leaving the WTO? In fact, leaving would make disappear one line of loud critique of Trump trade policies, which is that the multilateral rule of law is being thrown to the wind. The US would simply be no longer bound by WTO rules.
Neoliberal commentators and the Wall Street and offshoring businesses represented by the US Chamber of Commerce have been bashing the WTO for years, frustrated that it has been less and less capable of shoving down the throats of smaller countries a neoliberal policy agenda, given the multipolarity of real power there now, especially the BRICs. Having not had a good word to say for the WTO for years, perhaps even a decade or so, they will not be very credible defenders before Congress of its necessity much less its virtues.
So who, apart from the agricultural and food interests, will speak out in the days to come against WTO withdrawal? One strategy would be keep quiet, on the assumption that, if the issue is kept under the radar screen, the votes will simply not be there in the House and/or the Senate to move this forward-just as as they never were in the past; by contrast, provoking an outspoken public debate about the WTO would only make it more likely that the vote could go off the rails.
The last months in trade policy have exhibited a clear pattern: there is widespread faith that certain things will not happen even if promised or threatened-then, when they happen, widespread shock. I would not counsel complacency if one believes the US should remain in the WTO. There are some international organizations that it relatively easy to leave and return to. The WTO is not one of them.
Although the US was an original member of the GATT, the country rejoining the WTO would arguably require a new process of accession. This could mean that China for instance could determine the terms on which the US is allowed to re-enter. There is a curious historical irony here-because the relevant precedent for such a process is China’s own re-entry. China too was an original Member of GATT, but its membership was withdrawn through actions of Taiwan. When China sought to rejoin the GATT in 1987 far from its original membership being automatically renewed a complex accession process was initiated that morphed into the WTO accession negotiations once the WTO replaced the GATT. I doubt China would pass up the opportunity to make America pay a significant price for returning to the WTO.
For Congressman Tiffany, who is co-sponsoring the WTO withdrawal resolution, it is precisely the US having to deal with China on WTO terms that is the principal reason for leaving the WTO. Of course, however much one buys into the narrative that China has undermined the WTO or cheated rampantly on its rules, it is simply a reality that there is no legal process for removing or suspending its membership. If one thinks that China and the US can’t fruitfully coexist in the WTO, then it might seem that the US is going to have to leave.
There is however another option: instead of withdrawing from the WTO the US could propose that the WTO rules not be applicable between China and itself.As Mona Paulsen discusses in an article forthcoming this summer in the Yale Journal of International Law, This is exactly what the US did with the GATT in the case communist Czechoslovakia. Today in the WTO this could still be accomplished by a waiver. With the US-China relationship removed from the WTO, the costs and benefits of US membership would obviously look different, and some of the most fraught politics within the WTO would be eliminated. Something to think about, at least.
Thanks for this analysis. Very illuminating, and very clever in terms of the proposal.