The Absence of Consensus and Restraint in US Trade Policy: Implications for the World Trading System

This article provides a perspective from the United States (US) on the crisis facing the World Trade Organization. The author argues that there is a political consensus in the US that the current multilateral trade order is broken, but there is no consensus on what should replace it. This lack of affirmative political consensus, combined with a lack of rigorous legal restraint on presidential trade authority, constrains the country’s ability to play a constructive role in reforming the Organization that it views as fundamentally broken.