Foundational Fracture: Failing to Reform the World Trade Organization in an Age of Geopolitics

ABSTRACT The World Trade Organization (WTO) is at the crossroads, with a principal challenge raised to the organization by the United States in 2025 and a series of related, largely unsuccessful reform attempts over the last several years. To shed new light on why recent WTO reform attempts have been proving so difficult, we leverage evidence from close to 40 interviews conducted in Geneva in 2024 and 2025, and an array of recent reform‐related WTO documents. We argue that the main reform failures do not result from design inefficiencies or specific well‐defined disagreements. Rather, we propose that the situation in the WTO is best described as a foundational fracture , a deep split among WTO's principal members about the very purpose of the organization, combined with a long‐term inability of the WTO to update its institutional framework, and the mutual reinforcement of these two challenges. We only identify modest reform progress achieved over the last years in activities that are predominantly informal and focused on information exchange, without binding commitments and the ability to address the deep‐seated institutional issues. These findings contribute to broad debates on global governance transformation, beyond the WTO itself.