Can the WTO Survive and Perhaps Even Thrive During the Second Trump Term? A Hopeful Opinion
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The World Trade Organization (WTO), once a cornerstone of global trade, is now in serious longevity jeopardy, many exacerbated by the United States. Washington has imposed unilateral tariffs, withheld funding, and blocked Appellate Body appointments, leaving the dispute settlement system crippled. At the same time, multilateral negotiations have slowed to a trickle, as consensus among 166 sovereign Members has proven increasingly elusive. The very notion of trade as a “win-win” process is challenged, with Members exploiting exceptions in bad faith and treating trade as zero-sum. Yet, the article argues that the WTO can—and must—survive. To do so, it must demonstrate greater flexibility and pragmatism. Recent incremental achievements, like the Agreement on Trade Facilitation and the Fish Subsidies Agreement , show that progress, even if modest, is possible. The authors stress that clinging to mandatory consensus and the universal use of the most favored nation treatment prevents innovation. Alternatives such as plurilateral or sectoral “joint initiatives,” supported by the Secretariat, could allow willing members to move forward while others join later. Revitalizing dispute settlement is also critical. Some of the article’s proposals include faster timelines, limits on appeals, streamlined compliance proceedings, and a stronger appointment process to restore credibility. Ultimately, the central challenge is leadership: with the United States pulling back, the WTO needs new, diverse, and pragmatic leaders—whether among Members or within the Secretariat—to prioritize collective progress over narrow interests. Only then can the WTO move beyond paralysis and remain relevant in a changing world.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.022 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.025 | 0.031 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.004 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".