Getting 160-plus countries on the same page about anything is next to impossible. That’s why so many of the headlines out of the big World Trade Organization conference this week in the United Arab Emirates — “Meeting Seeks Modest Outcomes”; “Slim Hopes for Breakthrough” — convey low expectations.
Nevertheless, there is something important to celebrate: For over a year now, the diplomats responsible for reforming the W.T.O. have been trying out a new way of doing business, with remarkable results.
Instead of showing up to meetings with their own written proposals — and haggling over whose will get adopted — they started by listening to one another’s interests and goals. Then they came up with creative ways to achieve those goals and wrote a new set of proposed rules together. It may sound a lot like common sense, but in the rigid world of international trade, it amounted to a radical change. The result? They made more progress in one year than previous reform efforts had achieved in decades.
“I was really surprised at the extent of the progress,” Bruce Hirsh, a former legal adviser to the U.S. Mission to the W.T.O., told me after reading a draft of the reform proposal that was recently made public.
This new method, called “interest-based negotiation,” isn’t actually new. Marco Molina, the Guatemalan diplomat who facilitated these talks at the W.T.O. headquarters in Geneva, learned it in the 1990s, when he first joined his country’s Economic Ministry.
But the technique was novel for the W.T.O. Many diplomats there had never been involved in a process like that before. Still, last year, when members of the W.T.O. were scrambling to come up with a reform plan by an ambitious deadline, Mr. Molina’s name came up repeatedly as a possible facilitator. He agreed to lead informal talks, and set out “to demonstrate that this methodology actually works,” he told me.
He proved that it does work, even if this victory is partial and already under threat. More important, his experiment at the W.T.O. illustrates what could be a new model of U.S. leadership in a multipolar world.
It’s harder than it used to be for American officials to exert their will. But Americans can still use their influence to convene discussions capable of producing outcomes that might be better than one the United States would have engineered alone.
Under President Biden, U.S. diplomats have championed interest-based negotiations although they weren’t sure what the outcome would be. They also supported Mr. Molina taking on the role of facilitator, even though he had been a critic of U.S. positions at the W.T.O.
The draft text of the reform plan explained Mr. Molina’s methods with an analogy: Two people want to buy the last pumpkin in a market. Under the traditional way of negotiating at the W.T.O., they would argue over who had the right to take it home, a process that could last until the pumpkin rotted into mush. But interest-based talks begin by asking what each party wants the pumpkin for. If one wants the seeds to eat and the other wants the shell to make a jack-o’-lantern, they can share the pumpkin and both get what they need.
This hopeful new way of doing business is the silver lining of the crisis that Donald Trump created five years ago when he refused to appoint new adjudicators to the W.T.O.’s appellate body. American officials had long complained that the appellate body, which functions like an appeals court for trade disputes, was writing new rules for global trade instead of just enforcing the rules that members had already agreed to. The Obama administration blocked the reappointment of one adjudicator for that reason. Then the Trump administration refused to appoint anybody at all. With no new appointments, that part of the W.T.O. died. Today, any country that doesn’t like a W.T.O. ruling can simply appeal it — to nobody. Thirty-one cases wait in that void for a decision that might never come.
Many hoped that Joe Biden would ride in on a white horse and restore the old system. He didn’t. Instead, his trade representative, Katherine Tai, has insisted that W.T.O. members replace it with something better.
At first, members weren’t sure if they could trust the Americans or the strange new process that Mr. Molina introduced. But he worked hard to gain their trust. He held more than 350 meetings with over 145 members from every region of the world.
Members soon realized that informal mediation could help resolve trade disputes more quickly and amicably than litigation. They established rules for mediation so that more countries could take that route. They also recognized that some countries will always opt for the formal legal process, so they streamlined that.
These are big, pragmatic steps in the right direction that would make using the W.T.O. easier, quicker and more affordable once they are formally adopted. Members still haven’t agreed on what to do about the appellate body — the elephant in the room. Still, the process has done a lot to restore faith in the W.T.O.
Manuel Tovar Rivera, the minister of foreign trade for Costa Rica, a country that has had a case it won appealed into the void, told me that Mr. Molina’s new process “has been the driver to rebuild trust among members and to start believing again.”
That’s the good news. Now for the awful news: Mr. Molina was abruptly removed from his post as Guatemala’s deputy permanent representative to the W.T.O. by that country’s new government, for reasons that it has not explained.
It’s a setback for the entire world. At the meeting this week in Abu Dhabi, Mr. Molina’s colleagues expressed shock and fear that they won’t be able to complete the reform package without him by their self-imposed deadline of the end of the year.
It’s a reminder of how fragile consensus-building can be. Other threats loom as well, including the possibility that Donald Trump will be re-elected, which could send the W.T.O. into a tailspin all over again.
But something crucial was accomplished that cannot be taken away: Diplomats from around the world did something different, together, and saw that it worked. Now, hopefully, at the next international meeting, there were will be dozens of people like Mr. Molina, helping to light a new path toward a shared future that none of us could have imagined before.
