A Review of WTO Dysfunction under Power Politics: U.S. Evasion Strategies and Institutional Outlook

Abstract

In the context of increasing geopolitical competition and proliferation of security-driven trade barriers as well as growing industrial policy-driven activities by governments, the WTO has experienced systemic breakdown in negotiations, surveillance, and adjudication, the most significant of which is the absence of a functioning quorum in the Appellate Body since December 2019. It is a review that explores how power politics has allowed the U.S. strategies to circumvent, interrupt, selectively apply, or move WTO disciplines, and evaluates what it means for the future life of the institution and reform path. The analysis reveals four strategy clusters that are interrelated: appointment blockades and procedural incapacitation of the formal settlement of disputes, use of unilateral tariffs and enforcement tools outside the multilateral structures, trade policy securitisation with exception-based protection against multilateral inspection, and the strategic shift of forums to preferential, plurilateral and coalition-based rule-making. These methods overlap with the existing institutional design holes and changing internal political balances to increase institutional stresses on the system. The paper presents a conditional institutional perspective when viewed through the prism of the power-strategy-institutional effect analysis: managed legal pluralism is more feasible than quick full recovery, but the threat of systemic fragmentation is likely to become a deep division unless the member states re-engage the adjudicatory, negotiating and political oversight capabilities of the body.