Trump's unilateral imposition of reciprocal tariffs on scores of countries poses impending threat to the future of the rule-based multilateral global trading system under the WTO. What options do the WTO members have to salvage the organization?

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.