Finally, some good news at the WTO

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 recently in the United Arab Emirates – “Meeting Seeks Modest Outcomes,” “Slim Hopes for Breakthrough” – convey low expectations.

Nevertheless, there is something important to celebrate: for more than a year now, the diplomats responsible for reforming the WTO 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 US Mission to the WTO, 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 WTO headquarters in Geneva, learned it in the 1990s, when he first joined his country’s Economic Ministry.

But the technique was novel for the WTO. Many diplomats there had never been involved in a process like that before. Still, last year, when members of the WTO were scrambling to come up with a reform plan by an ambitious deadline, 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 WTO illustrates what could be a new model of US 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 Joe Biden, US diplomats have championed interest-based negotiations although they weren’t sure what the outcome would be. They also supported Molina taking on the role of facilitator, even though he had been a critic of US positions at the WTO.

(To be continued)