US selfishly sabotages WTO appellate body

Were it not for Washington obstructing the appointment of new judges, the de facto supreme court for world trade would not have stopped functioning on Wednesday. Although the paralysis of the appellate body of the World Trade Organization is what the United States has sought, it will prove to be its undoing.

The appellate body is supposed to have seven judges, and three are needed to hear an appeal. But new judges have been unable to be named to replace those whose terms expired as presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump have blocked any new appointments. As a result their number had dwindled to three. With the terms of two ending on Tuesday, the appellate body can no longer function as it has only one judge.

The WTO's lower court, the dispute settlement body, can still hear cases. But its rulings are essentially meaningless since the loser can appeal to the no longer functioning higher court.

It is not that the US wants a jungle law for world trade. It simply wants a global trading system that favors it. In recent years, the WTO appellate body has ruled time and again that the US has been behaving badly, that its time-honored tools, such as countervailing duties on countries accused of flooding the US market and harming US manufacturers, are illegal－the US has not been happy.

As the world's sole superpower, the US always believes that it can maintain its dominance by riding roughshod over the concerns and interests of other countries as it did in the past.

What it has forgotten is the fact that the world is not what it was, and neither is the landscape of world trade. The emerging economies have a growing share of the world economy, so their voices must be heard and their concerns fairly addressed.

Letting the "lights go out" at the appellate body is delivering what is "no doubt the most severe blow to the multilateral trading system since its establishment", Zhang Xiangchen, China's ambassador to the WTO, said.

But while the US may gain some immediate benefit in its trade battles with other countries, in the long run, what it is doing will only harm itself.

With efforts underway to establish an ersatz appellate body to arbitrate future trade disputes, it is evident that other countries are opposed to economic nationalism favored by the US.

Having heeded the lessons of Smoot-Hawley tariffs and the destructive policies implemented in those times, they want fair, rules-based economic relationships, not relationships determined by how much clout an economy has.