The return of trade barriers and economic sanctions has diminished the spirit of GATT. In this context, discuss the factors contributing to the decline of WTO in recent times.

GATT’s spirit, diminished

Most-favoured-nation treatment and national treatment were the legal heart. Exceptions existed — regional trade agreements, security, safeguards — but they were meant to be narrow. Tariffs as ordinary industrial policy, export controls on technology, green border taxes that poorer exporters read as protection, and sanctions that cut whole economies out of finance sit badly with that heart. Weaponised interdependence after 2022 made trade a tool of war policy. NAFTA/USMCA and other megaregionals moved rule-making out of Geneva. This is the deglobalisation of question 2(a), now named at the organisation that was supposed to prevent a 1930s repeat.

Factors in WTO decline

First, the Appellate Body was emptied by United States blocking of appointments. Members can appeal into the void. The policeman of the 1995 deal lost his court. Second, the Doha Development Round never closed. Agriculture, industrial tariffs and services could not be bargained into one package. Third, the consensus rule lets a few large members halt outcomes, while a much larger membership than 1947 GATT makes consensus harder. Fourth, China’s accession produced a systemic clash: subsidies, state enterprises and forced technology transfer claims that the old GATT text does not settle, and that Washington now prefers to fight with tariffs rather than with panels. Fifth, developing-country coalitions, including India, refuse to treat special and differential treatment as a sunset slogan, especially on public stockholding for food security. That is clout, treated in Paper II’s India questions; it is also gridlock if no bargain is offered. Sixth, digital trade, e-commerce and investment sit poorly in a 1994 text, so willing clubs write plurilaterals outside the single undertaking. Seventh, domestic politics in the United States turned the WTO into a symbol of lost factories, so compliance with adverse rulings became optional.

The organisation still notifies, still hosts talks, and still matters to states that cannot win a tariff war. It has declined as a binding constitutional order of world trade. That is the precise sense of decline.