Trump broke the global trading system, and Biden is incapable of fixing it

Add this to the list of things that Donald Trump broke and Joe Biden hasn’t fixed: the World Trade Organisation. In 2020, the WTO’S highest court for dealing with trade disputes stopped functioning. The last of its seven judges retired and, with the US blocking the appointment of any new ones, couldn’t be replaced. Unheard appeals are beginning to mount up.

The US has its reasons, of course. It grew sick of being challenged for using protectionist measures while Beijing continues to flout the rules with impunity.

The underlying problem is that the WTO was designed for an age in which the US, Japan and Germany were the world’s biggest exporters, and the organisation’s practices are built to favour exporter countries on the assumption that they operate broadly as market economies.

Now, with a centrally planned, subsidy-addicted superpower exporting the most, the US has become increasingly irritated by the trading system.

It isn’t really the fault of the judges – the US record on winning or losing WTO cases is in line with the average. But fundamentally, the WTO has failed in its mission to incentivise countries to become market economies.

That isn’t something that can be fixed by a negotiation over judicial appointments.

Given the impasse, it would be nice to see Mr Biden deliver on his promise to build a new trading alliance of democratic, market economies, as Barack Obama was trying to do.

Yet despite some rhetoric and talk of a carbon tariff, the White House seems content to let this agenda remain mired in the swamp of bureaucratic nit-picking, fierce lobbying and political posturing.

The result is that the new US trade policy is in effect the same as the old one: vacate the field and leave a vacuum behind.

One of the global trading problems plaguing us quite independently of the WTO’S issues is the shortage of semiconductors, the little microchips that go into all electronics.

The other day, while clearing out some junk, I amassed a pile of old phones, chargers, cables, cameras and so on, and I thought of all the semiconductors inside them. While companies battle to secure the latest, greatest versions of these tiny chips, the best that can be done with the old stock is to melt it down for recycling.

Thanks to the semiconductor shortage, the lead time for a new car is now six months or more and Apple has warned that it won’t be able to meet demand.

Just wait, though. In a few years, we will be drowning in microchips, overwhelmed and oversupplied, and soon after that the new gizmos will be deemed obsolete.

Somehow, when it’s simple plastic cups and packaging, the merry-goround of waste feels like it might be solvable. When it’s teeny, tiny microchips containing technologies that test the bounds of quantum physics, the madness is more apparent than ever.

What is it about motorway service stations? They seem to possess some magic power to send wasteful consumption into overdrive.

There you are, traipsing through the sticky, frazzled, squealing mass of families, anticipating another few hours of desperate measures to stave off tantrums in the back of the car, and an apparent solution presents itself: a pile of chocolate, a Mcdonald’s meal, an enormous coffee, mints, gum, an unsavoury stack of baby food pouches, anything, anything, to make this go faster, easier, more peacefully.

Back in the car, 20 minutes later, the realisation hits: all I’ve done is fill this place with rubbish and there are still three hours of the journey left. God help us.

The US grew sick of being challenged for using protectionist measures while Beijing continues to flout the rules with impunity