The supreme court of world trade, otherwise known as the “appellate body” of the World Trade Organization, will cease functioning on Wednesday. The court is supposed to have seven members but it currently has four vacancies, with two more members retiring on Tuesday. That leaves one active judge, two short of the number required to rule on international trade disputes.
Those vacancies haven’t been filled thanks to the Trump administration’s war on the WTO. The president has criticized the WTO for allowing China to retain its special status as a developing nation (though it’s now number two in the world economically) while looking the other way when it violates WTO rules. Instead of sanctioning China for subsidizing many of its products to gain a special advantage over its global competitors, the supreme court has instead ruled against Trump’s tariffs, which were enacted in part to deal with such subsidies. Accordingly, the Trump administration has refused to allow those vacancies to be filled.
Not only do WTO rulings against Trump’s tariffs violate the U.S. Constitution, they also threaten to limit Trump’s ability to manage foreign trade, which the Constitution allows. As Joe Zammit-Lucia of the globalist Radix think-tank expressed it, “President Trump has made it clear throughout his term that he has no time for multilateral deals and even less time for WTO judges telling him what he can and cannot do.”
The World Trade Organization is one of several globalist institutions established at the end of the Second World War, including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). It employs some 640 unelected bureaucrats in Geneva tasked with advising unelected adjudicators involved in settling trade disputes among its 164 members.
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Through “mission creep” the appellate body has assumed authority over national sovereignty, increasingly viewing itself as a bona-fide international court on trade matters.
President Trump has continued a policy first adopted by the Obama administration of blocking the appointment of judges to fill those vacancies, claiming (accurately) that the U.S. Constitution does not permit a foreign country, or foreign entity such as the WTO, to supersede American interests. As Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution clearly states, the president “shall have power, by and with the consent of the Senate, to make treaties.” Those WTO appellate body judges increasingly asserted their superiority over the Constitution in international trade law.
The president has also threatened to cut off U.S. funding for the WTO.
The “mother ship” of the Deep State, the Council on Foreign Relations, is upset that one of its key globalist institutions will no longer function as intended on Wednesday. Edward Alden, a “trade expert” at the CFR whined: “There is no question the Trump administration has killed the appellate body. That was its intention, and it has succeeded.”
More than 60 cases are pending before the court, leaving the parties in dispute having to work out their own difficulties without the “assistance” of unelected bureaucrats laboring in Geneva to install its global trade agenda.
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An Ivy League graduate and former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American, primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at [email protected].
