After Action Review of MC14

What objectives and outcomes for the WTO do the biggest players in the world trading system still have in common—and are there any contemporary problems where they see value in new binding multilateral rules?

Is the WTO's architecture—binding rules with allowable exceptions for emergencies—fit for purpose in a world where crises are so frequent they effectively define the norm?

Given that trade governance is increasingly migrating outside the WTO, what functions can the WTO perform that cannot be performed elsewhere—and what appetite is there for those functions among the full membership?

Is the WTO's role now essentially custodial—seeking to protect what has previously been agreed? If so, for those aligned with this mission, what are the most promising approaches to advance that remit?

Can diplomats in Geneva finish what ministers in Yaoundé could not—and over what time horizon? And, even granting that Geneva will do what Geneva does, given the realities uncovered above, is picking up the pieces of Yaoundé the best use of diplomats’ time?

This group is called Friends of Multilateralism. I am a friend of multilateralism too. But friendship requires honesty. MC14 was supposed to be the reform ministerial—the moment when the WTO demonstrated it could adapt. Instead, four days of negotiations in Yaoundé ended in acrimony. No agreement on reform. No agreement on the e-commerce moratorium, which has now lapsed for the first time since 1998. No agreement on incorporating the Investment Facilitation for Development deal despite 165 members supporting it against one. The Yaoundé texts have been pushed to Geneva with unclear commitment to finish the job. I don't want to relitigate who is to blame. I want to ask five questions that I think we need to face honestly. They concern ends, means, utility, remit, and trajectory of the WTO after MC14.

What objectives and outcomes for the WTO do the biggest players still have in common — and are there any contemporary problems where they see value in new binding multilateral rules?

Let us address the elephant in the room. The US Trade Representative left Yaoundé declaring the WTO would play only a limited role in future trade policy and announced the US would pursue its goals outside the institution. The US's December reform paper attacked the foundational MFN principle. Its bilateral deals violate WTO commitments. This is not a member seeking reform. This is a member that might have lost interest in binding multilateral rules.

China's state-capitalist model—a trillion-dollar trade surplus involving significant subsidisation—is said to be an unaddressed cause of most of the tensions in the system. Yet nobody at Yaoundé could even begin to discuss it. India stood alone at 165 to 1 on the investment facilitation agreement, blocking an accord it is already negotiating bilaterally—behaviour that suggests its interest is in preserving its veto, not in the substance of the rules. And the EU? The EU's trade commissioner questioned whether MFN remains fit for purpose after signing a bilateral deal with the US that itself looks like an MFN violation, then issued a post-conference statement reaffirming commitment to rules-based trade.

Is there any contemporary problem—digital trade, corporate subsidies, chokepoints, supply chain resilience, let alone climate and long-standing and legitimate agricultural trade matters—where all four of these players see value in negotiating new binding multilateral rules? I struggle to identify one. If the honest answer is that the big four share very little beyond a desire to keep the existing rules nominally on the books while pursuing their real interests elsewhere, then we need to reckon with what that means.

My first question was about ends. My second is about means. Is the WTO's architecture fit for purpose in the world we actually live in?

The WTO was designed around a specific logic: binding rules for normal times, with allowable exceptions for emergencies. Security exceptions, safeguard measures, balance-of-payments provisions—these exist because the founders understood that crises happen. But they assumed crises would be infrequent and temporary. The rules were the norm; the exceptions were the exceptions.

Look at the last six years. A pandemic. A European land war disrupting energy and grain supplies. A tariff war conducted under permanent national security invocations. And now a Gulf conflict creating energy and food shocks across continents. These are not occasional departures from normality. They are now the standard operating environment. When crises become so frequent that they effectively define the norm, a system of binding rules with emergency exceptions defaults into a system of discretion with a vestigial rulebook. The rules remain on paper, but their practical authority drains away as members invoke one exception after another.

The Director-General opened MC14 by saying the world trading system faces the worst disruptions in 80 years. She was right. And the conference had nothing to say about those disruptions. If the WTO cannot demonstrate its relevance during the worst disruptions in 80 years, when is it relevant?

This brings me to the reform process. The agenda being discussed—decision-making procedures, development provisions, level playing field—is institutional repair. But the challenge is architectural. The reform process is not addressing the elephants in the room. Minor institutional repair cannot fix a building whose foundations are shifting—and it certainly cannot redesign the architecture for a context it was never built to withstand.

Given that trade governance is increasingly migrating outside the WTO, what functions can it perform that cannot be performed elsewhere—and what appetite is there for those functions among the full membership?

At MC14 itself, 66 countries chose to implement the e-commerce agreement outside the WTO framework. The Multi-Party Interim Appeal Arbitration Arrangement operates without the Appellate Body. The EU and CPTPP are building their own cooperation framework. More nimble, smaller players are pursuing the FITP. RTAs are multiplying faster than cockroaches. Bilateral and plurilateral workarounds are no longer exceptions to the multilateral system. They are becoming the system.

If you are a trade minister in a mid-sized economy today, what do you go to the WTO for that you cannot get elsewhere? The honest answer may be: the existing rulebook. The monitoring and transparency functions. The baseline MFN tariff schedules. The technical standards on customs valuation and sanitary measures. These matter—but notice what is not on that list: new rules. The utility that remains is real but it is the utility of maintenance, not creation.

And even that utility depends on appetite. Do the full 166 members value these functions enough to sustain the institution—to fund it, nurture it, to send ministers to its conferences? Or will the migration of governance activity outward gradually drain the WTO of the political attention it needs to survive?

Which brings me to the hard question. Is the WTO's remit now essentially custodial—seeking to protect what has previously been agreed rather than generating new multilateral accords?

I want to be clear that custodianship is not nothing. If the WTO can hold the line on the rules that still govern most of world trade, that is a significant achievement in the current environment. The existing rulebook, imperfect as it is, provides a degree of predictability that the alternative— a pure free-for-all where might is right—does not.

But it is a fundamentally different remit from the one this institution was created for and the one this group was formed to support. It requires different expectations, different advocacy, and perhaps a different relationship with the institution.

And if custodianship is the realistic remit, then a second question follows: for those of us who accept that mission, what are promising approaches to advance it? How do you defend an existing rulebook when the biggest player openly violates it, when the exception clauses are being used to hollow it out, and when governance activity is migrating elsewhere? That is not a rhetorical question. It is a practical one, and I would genuinely like to hear this group's thinking on it.

Finally, trajectory. The Yaoundé texts go to Geneva. The Director-General proposed preserving them and finalising them at the next General Council. Can diplomats finish what ministers could not—and over what time horizon?

These are instruction-bound ambassadors with less room to manoeuvre than the ministers who have recently failed to find common ground. The political momentum a ministerial was supposed to generate will dissipate. The e-commerce moratorium has already lapsed. The conditions that made agreement impossible in Yaoundé have not changed.

And even granting that Geneva will do what Geneva does, I want to pose a harder question. Given the realities we have just discussed—the absence of shared ends among the major players, an architecture mismatched with a world of permanent crisis, the migration of governance outside the system, and a remit that may now be essentially custodial—is picking up the pieces of Yaoundé the best use of diplomats' time? 

Or should they be investing their energy in the more fundamental strategic rethink that these five questions point to? Because if that rethink doesn't happen — if we continue to treat institutional repair as a substitute for confronting the structural realities—then we are not preserving the multilateral trading system. We are managing its graceful decline. And I am not sure this group is content with that. Thank you.

Simon J. Evenett is Founder of the St. Gallen Endowment for Prosperity Through Trade, Professor of Geopolitics and Strategy at IMD Business School, Lausanne, Switzerland and CoChair of the World Economic Forum’s Trade & Investment Council. Comments can be sent to him at simon.evenett@sgept.org