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Stories about Venezuela are everywhere these days. Yesterday, for example, there was
Mary Anastasia O'Grady's chilling but excellent piece in The Wall Street Journal on
Prince Charles in Cuba. Ms. O'Grady didn't bury the lead. The Venezuelan connection was there in the first sentence:
Britain's Prince Charles and his wife, Camilla, thumbed their noses at the victims of Venezuela's atrocities last week with an official trip to Cuba-the first ever by a member of the British Royal Family.
The article went on to chronicle the how deeply complicit Cuba is in the nightmare that Venezuela has become.
From the trade perspective, one has to ask: has the United States just found another clever way to put pressure on the WTO's dispute settlement system? Or is this really a separate matter? After all, and especially if you are inclined to that first view, recognition of a regime usually turns on the judgment of whether a regime is, in fact, in control of a specific national territory. The questions of how it came to power and whether it is a good and decent government are secondary.
Secondary but not irrelevant. President Maduro's claim to legitimacy is indeed less than tenuous, and his policies are abhorrent. In short, our impression is that United States is acting in good faith here, which is to say that its target is not the dispute settlement system but the Maduro regime. That sentiment won't make the problem go away, but it does lead to two other observations.
The first, the more obvious of the two, is that the WTO cannot be completely shielded from all of the issues - that is to say the non-trade issues - that define the relationships among states. In fact, it is so shielded to a fair degree, but at some point, those larger issues intrude.
The second observation is something to put on the to-do list for that hoped for time when multilateral negotiations in the WTO are again the norm rather than the exception. If the time does come when members can turn to updating the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, we have a suggestion. We are outsiders here, but it seems to us that the provision governing non-application of the rules (the concessions) ought not to be limited to a one-time decision vis-à-vis countries acceding to the WTO. Logically, it should also apply to those situations in which the government of one member does not recognize the government of another.
In the meantime... Alas, there is no obvious solution in the meantime, which, as we read it, is just what that anonymous Geneva diplomat was saying. Ideally, Venezuela might be persuaded not to press the matter at this time. Perhaps Cuba could encourage them in that direction.
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