The WTO is piling up unanswered complaints from its members while the U.S. continues to block new WTO judges due to claims the WTO is overreaching its judicial powers.
The status of the WTO worldwide has been declining as more and more states ignore its rulings, leading to the organization declaring the loss in standing is a reflection of the loss of faith in “globalization,” a reality that was only possible thanks to American power, which is now waning.
Recently, the WTO warned its members that there will be no more appeals until 2024 when the members have pledged to remedy the problems that have drained its authority (including the lack of newly appointed judges).
An article in Reuters quotes Keith Rockwell, a Senior Fellow at the Hinrich Foundation as claiming the WTO is “teetering on the abyss of irrelevance.” He said, “People are not feeling in any way constrained by their obligations to the WTO when it comes to policy and that was not the case a decade ago.”
To this writer, this decline is due directly to the decline of the American Empire, a largely commercial Empire that granted much autonomy to its de facto client states in exchange for supporting U.S. foreign policy and opening their markets, their resources, their technologies up to U.S. interests.
Now, with the decline of American power and the rise of rival powers, the very seas are about to face great increases in transport cost due to the lack of an American fleet powerful enough and willing enough to sustain the pax Americana that was rooted in America’s aircraft carrier task forces.
Drones are in part to blame for why, ultimately, aircraft carriers will become less relevant, or at least easier for more nations to produce (drone carriers, for instance, would be much smaller and less complex to develop and construct that ones needed for aircraft flown by humans), but even as far as the will alone is concerned, America is finding itself less and less inclined to want to continue to be the keeper of peace in the world, and are finding less and less economic benefits for doing so.
The age of pax Americana is over, and with it will go the “great” global institutions, like the WTO, who relied so much on it even as many of them worked as much to undermine American power as they did to take opportunities that flowed FROM that very power.
About Author
Paul Collier
Paul Collier is the editor of The Freedomist newsite, our Weekday Reports, and our Monthly Publication, Freedomist Intelligence Advisor (previously McAlvany Intelligence Advisor). He has been involved in news publishing since 2003.
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