World Trade Organization Ministerial Post-Mortem

I was preparing to comment on the 14th World Trade Organization (WTO) ministerial conference and praise ministers for passing the low bar I discussed two weeks ago. Unfortunately, they failed to meet even that standard. What began two years ago after the 13th ministerial conference with high ambitions—reform the institution, finish the fisheries agreement, add pending joint statement initiatives to the body of WTO rules, make tangible progress on agriculture, extend the e-commerce tax moratorium—ended without accomplishing any of those things. Many of them were jettisoned long before the conference began, and by the time ministers arrived in Yaoundé, there were essentially only two on the table—a work plan for reform, itself a significant step back from considering actual reforms, and an extension of the e-commerce moratorium. By the end of the conference, neither goal had been achieved, and the conference ended without the usual ministerial declaration and punted the agenda to future meetings of the WTO General Council, which is composed of the same people who spent the last two years failing to agree on the same issues. If ministers could not agree, handing the ball back to the second team is not likely to be a key to success.

So what happened? In taking responsibility for the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, President John F. Kennedy recycled an old quote and said, “Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.” (The quote also has a thousand fathers, with variations going back as far as Tacitus.) That, by the way, was probably the last time any U.S. president admitted to making a mistake, but I digress. In the case of the WTO ministerial, it turns out that failure had many fathers, all of them trying to pin the blame on the others.

The proximate cause was last-minute disagreement over the length of the e-commerce moratorium. The United States strongly advocated for a permanent extension, both on the merits and its desire to avoid having to go through the torture of trying to get it renewed every two years, but more favored another time-limited extension, but for longer than two years. A compromise of a five-year extension with a required review after four years appeared to be in reach when Brazil, joined by Türkiye, announced they would not support anything longer than another two-year extension. The United States rejected that as nothing more than the status quo, and everybody went home. Of course, there was more going on behind the scenes, but one can only speculate. India, which had been the key opponent of any extension for years, was unusually quiet, though probably quite happy to have someone else carry its water and take the blame.

It is hard not to see the impact of Donald Trump behind the maneuvering. As I mentioned in my previous column, it was ironic that the Trump administration, notorious for its disdain for multilateral organizations and group decisionmaking, ran into a situation where it needed the organization, and the cooperation of nations it had spent the last year insulting, to get what it wanted. Ministers no doubt understood that, and Brazil, which had been a particular target of Trump’s attacks and higher tariffs, took the opportunity to get even, although the ostensible reason was a lack of progress on agriculture. India, which is still negotiating a trade agreement with the United States, wisely decided to stay out of the line of fire, though it could not have been disappointed with the outcome. The moral of this story, which I learned a long time ago on Capitol Hill, is what goes around comes around. Burning bridges is always a mistake because the people you dismiss today are the ones you’re going to need tomorrow.

At the same time, the United States should not escape some measure of blame for the final outcome. A two-year extension was far less than it wanted, and the administration had already retreated quite far from its original position. On the one hand, the administration would be justified in rejecting an outcome that gave them only 40 percent of the loaf, but on the other hand, the consequence was that it got nothing. And that matters enormously to our tech companies, which are most at risk for paying the taxes that are now permitted. Some have argued that nothing will happen immediately because the issue will be taken up at the General Council in May, and it will take time for countries that want to impose a tax to implement one. I am more pessimistic than that. Some countries have the tax mechanism already in place and have simply not activated it, waiting for the outcome of the moratorium. It will not take them long to start it up once they decide to do so. Also, as noted above, handing the issue off to the same people who couldn’t resolve it over the previous two years is not a sign that agreement will come anytime soon. The United States implicitly acknowledged that when it announced that it and 22 other countries agreed to continue honoring the moratorium. Hopefully, that number will grow. Finally, in addition to all that, the reform work plan, which the United States had also opposed, had been linked to the moratorium extension and went down with the ship.

I should not close, however, without acknowledging that the ministerial was not entirely devoid of accomplishments. Ministers adopted decisions on improving the integration of small economies into the trading system and enhancing implementation of special and differential treatment provisions in the Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures and the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade. In addition, former Deputy Director General Alan Wolff, in a recent piece, praised the 66 WTO members that produced a formal e-commerce agreement and opened it for signature by others. The countries already participating cover 70 percent of world trade, so this is not an insignificant event. Thanks primarily to expected Indian opposition, the agreement will not yet be part of the WTO rulebook, but it was done under the WTO umbrella and signals an approach we will be seeing more often—coalitions of the willing moving ahead on trade liberalization, leaving behind those who decline to participate. The United States was not a party to the agreement, a decision future administrations will come to regret.

Author’s Note: I retired from CSIS on March 29, 2026. I plan to continue writing this column and participating in the Trade Guys podcast, so please continue to read and listen. However, my CSIS email address will no longer be working, so if readers or podcast listeners want to contact me directly, they should do so at [email protected].

William A. Reinsch is a senior adviser (non-resident) and Scholl Chair emeritus with the Economics Program and Scholl Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.