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We have three comments:
Good News. Admittedly, our knowledge of Roberto Azevêdo is remote. We know him mainly through his achievements, through his speeches, through YouTube, and through press reports. But that's enough. Roberto Azevêdo is an effective leader and an extremely impressive diplomat. Putting the Dow aside, good news is hard to find. But it's out there. The reappointment of Roberto Azevêdo as Director-General of the WTO is good news indeed.
The Missing USTR. As for the other questions on President Trump and U.S. trade that were put to the Director General yesterday, for the most part, he ducked them. Well, that's not quite right. It would be more accurate to say that he put them off, and he did so with a fair explanation. Specifically, he said:
"I would not be in a position to be commenting on any kind of specific policy on the part of an administration where the nominee for USTR has not even been confirmed. And that's normally my main interlocutor."
In short, most of the questions about U.S. trade policy will have to wait until America once again has a USTR. We noted last Friday that a highly-qualified individual,
Robert Lighthizer, has been appointed, but the Senate has yet to act on that appointment. If there is a lesson from yesterday's WTO press conference, it is that the Senate's failure to act on the Lighthizer nomination is not without costs to the United States.
Trump, The U.S., and The WTO. Finally and not surprisingly, the issue of trade got a fair amount of prime time in President Trump's speech last night to a joint session of Congress. We'll come back to his comments on NAFTA and on China's entry into the WTO in a later TTALK Quote. The passage of the speech that comes to mind here is more general in nature and yet, to our ears, it too is relevant to America's approach to the WTO. The passage we have in mind is this one:
"We will respect historic institutions, but we will respect the foreign rights of all nations, and they have to respect our rights as a nation also. (Applause.) Free nations are the best vehicle for expressing the will of the people, and America respects the right of all nations to chart their own path."
We are inclined to make the happy assumption that the WTO is among those historic institutions which the Trump Administration intends to respect. We would add to that the almost tautological observations that America's obligations in and to the WTO are very much American choices, enshrined in American law, most notably the Uruguay Round Agreements Act of 1994.
That should be the starting point for any discussion about the United States and the WTO, but, of course, it won't be the last word. There is, for example, the question of whether, through its system of jurisprudence, the WTO has created obligations to which the United States never agreed. We are not taking a position on that question-not here anyway-but it is one that seems destined to have its day.
And there is a deeper question. Namely, is the WTO simply and exclusively an instrument for carrying out the collective will of the 164 sovereign nations that belong to it? Or does it embody some larger role as an instrument of global governance, one with its own goals and personality? That's not the kind of question to which one expects a definitive answer. It's a pendulum question, and our guess is that the Trump Administration will work to move the WTO pendulum closer to the narrower, member-driven definition.
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