Revision summary
Trump’s 2025 reciprocal tariffs, on top of a blocked Appellate Body, treat MFN as optional and threaten WTO as policeman. Salvage options: restore appeals or widen MPIA, plurilaterals, a subsidy-for-S&DT reform bargain, G20 politics, and FTA hedges. India’s stake is public stockholding, digital rules and a forum in which power is not the only law. A variable-geometry WTO is more likely than a 1995 restoration. Letting the organisation die would leave only tariff nationalism.
Model answer
Copper italics in this answer — like this — are the key facts. Each one is unpacked in the Facts & figures rail.
Introduction
The WTO was the legal roof of a rule-based trading order after 1995. Trump’s reciprocal tariffs in 2025, layered on an Appellate Body that the United States had already starved, threaten that roof in the open. Members cannot pretend the organisation is fine. They can try to salvage it. Options exist. A full restoration of 1995 is not one of them in the near term.
Body
The threat
Unilateral ‘reciprocal’ tariffs treat MFN as optional. If the largest economy prices every bilateral deficit as a sin, GATT Article I is a sermon. The dispute system cannot discipline what it cannot hear. Other members then copy: industrial policy, export controls, green tariffs. Weaponised interdependence becomes the operating system. Developing countries lose the one forum where a small state could, in theory, win a panel.
Salvage options
First, restore a functioning appellate tier — either by ending the U.S. blockade or by widening the MPIA (multi-party interim appeal) so that a critical mass trades under law even if Washington stays out. Second, plurilateral deals among the willing (e-commerce, investment facilitation) that do not wait for consensus, with opt-ins for the South. Third, a reform bargain: more transparency on industrial subsidies (including China’s), in exchange for real special and differential treatment and a peace clause that India can live with on public stockholding. Fourth, G20 and UNCTAD political steering so that trade is not only a Geneva technician’s file. Fifth, hedge with FTAs (India–EU, RCEP-adjacent supply chains) without abandoning the WTO brand — salvage is dual-track.
Power and India
Options fail if they require the U.S. to become 1995 again. Salvage may mean a WTO of variable geometry: a core of members who sue and comply, a periphery of tariff nationalists. India should not be the periphery. It needs the legal roof for food security, for resisting punitive digital rules, and for suing when its goods are hit. It should not, however, treat every reform as a Northern trick. A salvage coalition with the EU, ASEAN, Brazil and African exporters is more serious than a solo veto identity.
The organisation is salvageable as a rule-language and notification machine even if it is weak as a policeman. Letting it die would leave only power. That is the 1930s lesson the syllabus still wants.
Flow diagram
Conclusion
Reciprocal tariffs plus a dead appeals bench are an existential stress test. Members can salvage WTO through MPIA, plurilaterals, a subsidy–S&DT bargain and FTA hedges. They cannot wait for Washington to repent.
Quick related
Students also ask
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NonAlignment 2·0 underscores India's unique aspiration to emerge as a site for an alternative universality. Comment
Next question on this syllabus topic (2025 · Q7(c)). View answer →
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Can India sue the United States at WTO over tariffs?
It can start a case. With no Appellate Body and a nationalist White House, winning on paper may not open the U.S. market. That is why salvage is political as well as legal.
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Do FTAs replace WTO?
They hedge. They cannot set global MFN or a single subsidy rule. Dual-track is salvage, not abandonment.
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India's reluctance to perceive any 'existential threat' inevitably made the multilateral path to nuclear security a 'default option' until it decided to cross nuclear Rubicon in 1998. Identify and analyze some of the major reasons behind this shift in India's position on the nuclear question
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