With the Trump regime on a mission to cripple and effectively kill the World Trade Organization (WTO) by intentionally preventing its appellate body from functioning, what is rest of the world that still plays by the rules suppose to do?
Well, they may create their own appellate body.
The European Union has proposed the creation of a new international body where trade disputes can be settled and they've just won the support of the world's largest trader.
From Bloomberg:
On Tuesday, China’s Ambassador to the WTO Zhang Xiangchen told Bloomberg News that Beijing is actively working to support the EU’s vision of an appeal-arbitration model, which essentially replicates the work of the WTO’s soon-to-be defunct appellate body. [...]
While the conversations are still preliminary, the plan has drawn serious interest from various other WTO members such as Australia, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Japan and Turkey, according to officials familiar with the matter.
“There has been a gradual support for this as a very unfortunate Plan B,” former appellate body member James Bacchus told Bloomberg in an interview. “Now it seems to be the best option, given all the lousy options we have left.”
This is something that will have significant implications for the world long after Trump is gone.
The rest of the world can collaborate on the creation of a new appellate court that will play by a different set of rules that weren't shepherded by the United States. And that doesn't necessarily mean the new rules will be less favorable to the United States but, despite what Trump says, the WTO has ruled in our favor far more often than not since it was founded in 1995.
If I'm the European Union or China, I'm moving ahead with this proposal even if Trump is defeated in the next election because the United States is only ever a few years away from electing another flying monkey to the highest office in the world.
The Republican party itself makes us unreliable in the long term even they aren't currently in power.