Trump & Trade: The Crisis in the Multilateral Trading System
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
President Trump is widely seen as reversing 70 years of US trade policy and abdicating the American hegemon’s traditional leadership role in the multilateral trading system. Trump has threatened to withdraw the US from the WTO, abandoned trade multilateralism for aggressive unilateralism, and jeopardised the WTO’s dispute settlement mechanism by blocking appointments to its Appellate Body. As this article shows, however, both the crisis in the multilateral trading system and the American hegemon’s turn away from the WTO – including abandoning multilateral trade negotiations and blocking Appellate Body appointments – originated prior to Trump. This shift in the US orientation towards the multilateral trading system cannot, therefore, solely be attributed to the rise of populism under Trump. It is also a reaction to the decline of the US’s institutional power – its power over the core institution and rules governing trade. Amid the rise of China and other emerging powers, the US’s ability to dominate global trade governance and write the rules of global trade sharply diminished, leading to an erosion of American support for the multilateral trading system it once led. While realism has fallen out of favour in IPE, understanding recent dynamics in the trading system requires revisiting its core insights.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it