The World Trade Organisation (WTO) is standing at a critical crossroads. The Appellate Body has sat empty since December 2019. The Doha Round has been dead in all but name since 2001. And the last three years have witnessed the most aggressive wave of tariff escalation since the 1930s. The verdict on the WTO seems obvious: a rulebook nobody enforces, a court nobody can appeal to, a negotiating forum that hasn’t produced deals. That widely repeated story is indeed badly incomplete. The WTO is not disappearing, but being stress-tested. Four claims support this view.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Since World War II, the judicialization of international relations has expanded dramatically across all areas. Notably, the WTO stands as an international body that no other peers can match. It has a standing institution, compulsory and exclusive jurisdiction, and a body of jurisprudence built case by case. This is in sharp contrast with the International Court of Justice, whose jurisdiction depends on state consent, or with the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, which leaves states a menu of forums to choose from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The WTO also benefited from a procedural shift that flipped from positive consensus to negative consensus, meaning that reports are adopted automatically unless every member, including the winner, agrees to block them. That change gave its rulings real teeth. And until its paralysis, the Appellate Body itself was the only permanent appellate mechanism in general international law that has developed coherent jurisprudence across cases, often regarded as the \u201cCrown Jewel\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The numbers back this up. The WTO has had 646 disputes brought to its Dispute Settlement Body to date, since 1995. The ICJ has heard roughly 200 contentious cases across more than three times the WTO’s lifespan. ITLOS has handled 36 cases since 1996, a small fraction of the WTO’s docket.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The United States blocked the new Appellate Body appointments and caused the dysfunctional of the Appellate Body from December 2019. That paralysis is genuine. But it has not stopped the rest of the system from working, or from being used.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 2020, a coalition created the Multi-Party Interim Appeal Arbitration Arrangement (MPIA), a binding appeal mechanism serving as a temporary alternative for appellate review. Members are actively choosing to preserve a functioning two-tier system for themselves rather than let one country\u2019s veto take the whole structure down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The 2025 tariffs under Trump\u2019s second term make the point even more sharply. If the Appellate Body crisis had genuinely discredited the forum, states would have no reason to keep filing the escalating tariffs there. Instead, China, Canada and Brazil filed cases against the U.S. inside the institution. That is a revealed-preference point. The states most associated with the current wave of unilateralism are not walking away from WTO adjudication, in the middle of a trade war, a stronger signal of institutional relevance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nobody has actually left. The EU and China remain active participants and promoters of the MPIA. The United States, meanwhile, is best described as resigning without leaving. Since a February 2025 executive order, the US has withdrawn from or suspended participation in 66 international organisations and agreements, including a second withdrawal from UNESCO, the World Health Organisation, and the Paris Agreement. The WTO is conspicuously not on that list, and the U.S. remains an active member, keeps rejecting reform proposals it disagrees with, and shows up to Dispute Settlement Body meetings. A form of active engagement, albeit through obstruction. The US is fighting over what the WTO should be, not exiting the fight. In addition, Members have responded with Joint Statement Initiatives, with over 150 members participating in at least one, though legitimacy questions about plurilateral rulemaking remain unresolved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The deglobalisation narrative treats tariff escalation and Appellate Body paralysis as proof of the erosion of the rules-based trading system. The WTO\u2019s own trade data tells a more complicated story. World merchandise trade volume grew by 4.6 percent in 2025, with roughly 75 percent of trade still conducted on most-favored-nation terms. The basic principles such as MFN, bound tariff schedules, and transparency obligations are precisely what let trade reroute in an orderly, measurable way instead of collapsing into ad hoc bilateral retaliation. This suggests that trade is not contracting, but being redirected, something closer to \u201creglobalisation\u201d rather than deglobalisation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Appellate Body crisis isn\u2019t a self-contained judicial failure. It’s a sympton sitting on top of two other layers: a dead negotiating function, and a geopolitical reality that no longer produces the consensus multilateralism requires.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Negotiation paralysis is the root, not just the backdrop. The single-undertaking approach, combined with a 166-member consensus rule, has made new multilateral rulemaking nearly impossible since the Doha Round. That\u2019s closely tied to the critique of judicial activism of the Appellate Body. In the US\u2013Shrimp<\/em>, the Appellate Body has to interpret broadly to fill the gap of how trade rules should accommodate environmental protection. This is often read as activism under conditions of weak political guidance, judges filling a vacuum left by a dead legislature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Geopolitics and geoeconomics have redrawn the battlefield on top of that. Multipolarity does not automatically produce more multilateral cooperation, but generates fragmentation, competing blocs, and institutional deadlocks. Today, trade policy is no longer treated as a purely economic instrument; it is deeply entangled with national security, industrial policy, from export controls on critical technologies to subsidies for strategic sectors. Tariffs, sanctions, supply\u2011chain interventions, and standards\u2011setting have become normal tools of great-power competition, with the US\u2013China rivalry at the centre. This is precisely what strains the dispute settlement system built to resolve disputes over market access, tariffs, and other trade\u2011related obligations, not to arbitrate high politics or broader geopolitical conflicts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet supply-chain interdependence puts a floor under how far anyone can retreat, the layer that actually explains why the system holds despite the first two. We are living in an increasingly interdependent world; economic production is bound together through dense networks of trade, finance, technology, and supply chains, meaning that genuine dejudicialization and unilateral retaliation aren’t realistic for anyone, including the states most frustrated with how the WTO currently operates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The more useful question is not whether the WTO is still in use. The real question is on whose terms that use continues: whether negotiation reform, dispute settlement reform, and accommodation of new economic realities can turn \u201cstill in use\u201d into making the system \u201cused well\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ————————————————————————-<\/p>\n\n\n\n As opini\u00f5es presentes nos posts do Blog representam a vis\u00e3o de seus autores e n\u00e3o necessariamente as opini\u00f5es da ILA-Brasil e seus membros.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The World Trade Organisation (WTO) is standing at a critical crossroads. The Appellate Body has sat empty since December 2019. The Doha Round has been dead in all but name since 2001. And the last three years have witnessed the most aggressive wave of tariff escalation since the 1930s. The verdict on the WTO seems … Continue lendo “Still in Use? A Living WTO in the Age of Unilateralism”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2786,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,334,4],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[366],"class_list":["post-2784","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-destaque","category-novos","category-posts"],"authors":[{"term_id":366,"user_id":0,"is_guest":1,"slug":"jiangyuan-fu","display_name":"Jiangyuan Fu","avatar_url":{"url":"https:\/\/ilabrasil.com.br\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/jiangyuan-profile.webp","url2x":"https:\/\/ilabrasil.com.br\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/jiangyuan-profile.webp"},"0":null,"1":"","2":"","3":"","4":"","5":"","6":"","7":"","8":""}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ilabrasil.com.br\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2784","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ilabrasil.com.br\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ilabrasil.com.br\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ilabrasil.com.br\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ilabrasil.com.br\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2784"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ilabrasil.com.br\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2784\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2788,"href":"https:\/\/ilabrasil.com.br\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2784\/revisions\/2788"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ilabrasil.com.br\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ilabrasil.com.br\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ilabrasil.com.br\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ilabrasil.com.br\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2784"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ilabrasil.com.br\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=2784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}