Position of Joe Biden’s Administration on the World Trade Organization

Abstract

The election of Democratic Party candidate Joe Biden as President of the United States did not change Washington’s negative attitude towards the activities of the World Trade Organization (WTO). The historically established consensus of the Republican and Democratic parties, expressed in the general similarity of the approach of the legislative and executive branches of the U.S. government to the WTO as a tool primarily for realizing U.S. national interests in the foreign economic sphere, hinders the achievement of generally acceptable agreements within the WTO in key areas of its activities. Like the previous administration of Donald Trump, Joe Biden’s administration has, in particular, been blocking the activities of the WTO’s Appellate Body for a number of years. Despite the Democratic President’s statements about the commitment of the United States to the principles of liberal trade, the White House, as before, proceeds from the desire to maintain the leading role of the United States in the WTO, even at the cost of curtailing certain areas of its work. The dominant desire is to transform the WTO into an international economic mechanism to strategically contain China and openly oppose Russia by politicizing the WTO and taking measures that pave the way for the complete dismantling of the rules-based multilateral trading system. The WTO is in fact in a state of permanent institutional crisis in a number of central areas of its activity. The only way to deal with the current crisis is to give economics precedence, not politics, and prevent violations of agreed multilateral trade rules by unilateral actions; otherwise the negative impact on world markets and the economies of many WTO members will continue.