My Say: From progressive liberalisation to strategic protection: The quiet rewriting of trade doctrine

The most recent World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial Conference, held in Yaoundé, Cameroon, from March 26 to 30, was meant, once again, to restore confidence in the multilateral trading system. Instead, it produced a now familiar mix of limited decisions, deferred disagreements and continued deadlock on the issues that matter most.

Sadly, this is no longer surprising. It has, in fact, become expected.

But this is not merely an institutional failure. What we are witnessing is something more fundamental. The doctrine that once underpinned the global trading system is itself being quietly rewritten.

For decades, progressive liberalisation was the organising principle of international trade. The logic was straightforward: reduce tariffs and non-tariff barriers incrementally, embed predictability through rules, and extend disciplines into new areas such as services and intellectual property. From the successive rounds of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) to the establishment of the WTO in 1995, liberalisation was not treated as a policy choice to be justified anew each time. Instead, it was seen as the default trajectory.

The gains from that approach were not merely theoretical. The Tokyo Round, which ran from 1973 to 1979 and involved more than 100 countries, brought substantial reductions in industrial tariffs and produced disciplines on subsidies, technical barriers to trade and government procurement. Those outcomes did not create today’s global economy on their own, but they did help make cross-border trade and investment more predictable, and that mattered for the expansion of production networks and foreign direct investments, in the decades that followed.

That underlying premise has steadily eroded.

It is tempting to attribute the WTO’s malaise to more recent developments: US-China strategic rivalry, the unilateralism associated with US President Donald Trump, or concerns about state-led economic models. But to do so is to mistake symptoms for causes. The deeper fractures in the system predate all of this and have been visible for a very long time.

The Doha Development Agenda (DDA), formally launched at the 4th WTO Ministerial Conference in Doha in November 2001, was built on a delicate political compact. Developing countries were expected to undertake further liberalisation, especially in industrial tariffs and services, while developed countries were expected to address long-standing asymmetries, most notably in agriculture, and to give meaningful content to special and differential treatment. The bargain was never simply one of liberalisation in exchange for aid. But it did rest on the understanding that development concerns would be adequately addressed.

More than two decades on, that compact has effectively collapsed.

Agricultural protection in advanced economies remains a case in point. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s own monitoring indicates that support to agriculture remains substantial, even if its composition has changed over time. Sensitive sectors, across both developed and developing countries, have remained politically difficult to open. Tariff peaks and non-tariff measures have persisted.

By the end of the first decade of the DDA negotiations, it was already clear that the round had reached an impasse. The collapse of the July 2008 mini-ministerial in Geneva, Switzerland, with disagreement over the special safeguard mechanism at its core, marked a turning point from which the round never truly recovered. Yet, instead of confronting that reality, the system adjusted by lowering its ambitions. Incremental outcomes, however modest, came to be presented as accomplishments, or held up as evidence of continued relevance.

The WTO Agreement on Fisheries Subsidies is often cited as one such achievement. It does impose disciplines on subsidies linked to illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing. But negotiations on broader and more commercially consequential forms of fisheries support remain unresolved.

In the current state of geopolitical flux, it is worth acknowledging that the WTO was designed for a different era, one in which there was at least a baseline convergence around the desirability of liberalisation. Its rules are intended to discipline tariffs, regulate market access and address certain forms of discrimination. They are much less well-suited to a world in which industrial policy, strategic competition and national security concerns now sit at the centre of trade policy.

No longer anchored primarily in efficiency, trade policy today is shaped by resilience, security and domestic political calculation. In the US, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act have been used to channel support towards clean energy, domestic manufacturing and semiconductors. In the European Union, the Green Deal Industrial Plan and the foreign investment screening framework reflect a similar willingness to align trade and investment policy more closely with security and industrial priorities.

Subsidies for strategic industries, export controls on critical technologies and investment screening are no longer exceptional instruments. They have become standard policy tools. Supply chains, once organised primarily for efficiency and cost optimisation, are now increasingly being reorganised for resilience and risk mitigation. Where earlier rounds of liberalisation helped catalyse deeper economic integration, today’s reconfiguration reflects a more cautious logic of diversification and de-risking.

Crucially, these measures are not being presented as departures from sound policy. They are justified as necessary, responsible and, in many jurisdictions, resonate with populist sentiment. Protection, in this context, is not an aberration. It is fast becoming the new norm.

The WTO struggles to engage with this reality. Its consensus-based decision-making, once seen as a guarantor of legitimacy and inclusiveness, has become a structural constraint. Meaningful reform would require either amending existing rules or developing new disciplines in areas such as subsidies, state-owned enterprises and security-related trade measures. Yet such reform is exceedingly difficult in a system where consensus remains the governing principle.

That is why discussions on WTO reform often feel circular. There is no shortage of diagnosis. What is lacking is a credible route from diagnosis to treatment.

Even the most frequently cited sources of disruption offer little prospect of reversal. It is naïve to assume that a change of administration in Washington would restore the earlier era of progressive liberalisation. The shift in the US towards industrial policy, strategic trade measures and greater scepticism of unfettered openness runs deeper than any one presidency. The same is true, in different ways, across much of the West, where domestic pressures have made defensive trade politics easier to justify.

Similarly, debates over the compatibility of different economic models with WTO disciplines are not without merit, but the system was never designed to comprehensively regulate every form of state intervention that has become salient in today’s strategic environment. To do so would require a degree of rule revision that current geopolitical conditions make very difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.

Meanwhile, the increased resort to national security arguments has further complicated the landscape. Article XXI of the GATT was once used sparingly. In recent years, however, it has featured much more prominently in both disputes and policy justifications, reflecting the expansion of security-linked trade measures. Once such measures are normalised and domestically rewarded, the incentive to return to an earlier liberalising logic weakens further.

In this context, the limited outcomes of the most recent Ministerial may prove more consequential than they first appear. They reinforce a pattern that is becoming harder to ignore: the WTO is no longer the primary site in which the future of trade rules is being shaped.

This does not mean that rules-based trade has ended. But it does strongly suggest that rule-making is increasingly migrating into a variety of institutional anchors. Agreements are still being concluded, often in regional or plurilateral settings. The Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership and Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, for example, have advanced commitments in areas such as services, investment and e-commerce outside the WTO framework. The centre of gravity is, surely and perhaps not so slowly, shifting. It is also where time, financial resources and negotiating capacity should be more deliberately invested.

Calls for reform will continue. But without a credible pathway through the consensus trap, reform risks becoming an exercise in repetition rather than renewal. That is the deeper significance of the current moment. The WTO’s difficulties are not simply the result of poor negotiating tactics or temporary geopolitical tensions. They reflect a mismatch between an institution built for an earlier trade doctrine and a world that has moved on.

The core issue confronting us, therefore, is not simply whether the WTO can be reformed. It is whether the current era requires a different institutional response altogether, one that recognises selective openness as a lived reality, accommodates industrial policy more honestly, and balances efficiency with resilience and security.

For much of the post-WWII period, the central question in trade policy was how far and how fast liberalisation should proceed. That question no longer captures the moment. In today’s emerging landscape, the real challenge is how to govern trade in a world where openness is increasingly conditional, and protectionism is fast becoming the default.