Ratification of the ITO Charter in the U.S. domestic political discourse, 1948–1950

After World War II, the United States contributed largely to the formulation of the basic principles of the international trade regime, which determine its overall shape up to the present day. At the same time, it is the United States, represented by Donald Trump, that perhaps poses the main threat to these principles, seeking to gain unilateral advantages through protectionist measures and the revision of trade agreements. In order to provide a better understanding of this transformation of the U.S. foreign economic priorities, this paper examines the domestic political debates that unfolded in the United States back in the late 1940s on the ratification of the Charter of the International Trade Organization (ITO), which was supposed to become the main tool of international trade liberalization. The first section of the article examines the history of negotiations on various drafts of the Charter. The author concludes that the final version of the ITO Charter, agreed upon in Havana in 1948, cannot be considered a U.S. landslide victory — the American delegation failed to defend the basic principles of trade liberalization that it advocated, with the document containing a large number of loopholes and reservations eroding its initial concept. This fact was well understood by ITO supporters among the American political and business elites, who, as shown in the second and third sections of the article, respectively, made significant efforts to secure the ratification of the Charter. To this end, a special Committee for International Trade Organization, which included dozens of major American businessmen, was formed. All these efforts, however, could not overcome the resistance of the opposition to the ratification of the Charter, which included both staunch protectionists and those advocates of international trade liberalization, who did not welcome the version of the Charter adopted in Havana. Under these conditions, the support for the Charter, including from the Truman administration, began to fade away. The author concludes that the U.S. inability to ‘push through’ its draft Charter had negative political and reputational consequences, which, however, were largely offset by the successful signing of the GATT. At the same time, the most serious consequence of the ITO failure was the aggravation of international tensions, which could have otherwise been mitigated by an organization regulating world trade.