What the US seeks from ‘reform’ at the WTO

 In its vision of WTO ‘reform’, the US would have a freer hand to set the trade body’s agenda at the expense of consensus decision-making.

Goh Chien Yen and Kinda Mohamadieh

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AS trade ministers prepared to gather in Yaoundé, Cameroon, for the World Trade Organization (WTO)’s 14th Ministerial Conference (MC14), the preparatory process had produced a dense fog of competing ‘reform’ proposals, draft ministerial statements and workplans.

In the run-up to MC14, the facilitator-led consultations on ‘WTO reform’, held at the WTO headquarters in Geneva, focused on decision-making, development, special and differential treatment (S&DT), and level-playing-field issues under which the United States and the European Union (EU) sought new rules targeting state-owned enterprises and subsidies. In their so-called ‘reform’ proposals, fundamental pillars of the multilateral trading system, notably S&DT and non-discrimination through ‘most-favoured nation’ (MFN) treatment, were directly challenged and disparaged.

The sheer volume and scope of the consultations on ‘WTO reform’ had muddied the picture of what exactly needed ministerial attention and decision at MC14. It obscured the fact that the US – which has done more than any other WTO member state to destabilise the multilateral trading system through unilateral tariffs, bilateral Agreements on Reciprocal Trade (ARTs), and paralysing the WTO’s Appellate Body for adjudicating trade disputes – is not primarily interested in the reform or continued relevance of the WTO. The country’s 2026 Trade Policy Agenda, released before MC14, makes this plain: the US will push to reorient the WTO’s negotiating function by ‘favouring meaningful plurilateral agreements’ and ‘urging reassessment of the Most Favoured Nation (MFN) principle’ so that trading nations can differentiate among partners in their liberalisation commitments.

The MFN rule is the foundational principle of the WTO that requires any trade advantage granted to one WTO member to be extended equally to all. The US paper on WTO reform submitted to the WTO’s General Council in December 2025 (WTO document WT/GC/W/984) argued that MFN ‘is not just unsuitable for this era’ but actively prevents countries from optimising their trade relationships. In its second reform paper, submitted just days before MC14 (WT/GC/W/998, 23 March 2026), the US called for a rethink of how the MFN principle functions and its links to reciprocity.

Meanwhile, outside the WTO, the US was pursuing its trade interests through bilateral ARTs with Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia and others. Since its Supreme Court struck down the legal basis for these ARTs, Sections 122 and 301 of the US’ 1974 Trade Act have been conveniently invoked.

The US pushback on MFN is closely linked to its proposition to turn the WTO into a platform for plurilateral deals among countries of similar interest. In its first reform submission in December 2025, the US argued that plurilateral agreements should allow ‘likeminded trading partners’ to strengthen ties ‘within the architecture of the WTO agreements’, with benefits limited to consenting parties – that is, on a non-MFN basis. The paper warns that without a path for plurilaterals, the WTO is ‘not a viable forum for negotiating’.

The US’ March submission on reform stresses the need to find ‘a more flexible pathway to incorporate plurilateral agreements into the WTO architecture’, pointing to the option of what it calls ‘interim plurilaterals’, which it understands to be ‘voluntary and temporary agreements among a subset of Members to move forward on specific issues without needing full consensus’. Read together with the Trade Policy Agenda’s call to reassess MFN, the logic becomes clear: plurilaterals will become the vehicle through which the US intends to displace MFN as the organising principle of the multilateral trading system. Members that cannot or choose not to join will simply be left out.

At MC14, the US actively supported the adoption of the plurilateral Investment Facilitation Agreement (IFA) into the WTO’s legal architecture – despite the US not having participated in the IFA negotiations and having no interest in being a party to it. US Ambassador to the WTO Joseph Barloon identified the IFA as one of a limited number of issues the US wanted decided at MC14.

Why would the US seek to push through an agreement it will not sign? Because the IFA is not the end but the means. Its incorporation into the WTO – while its initiation, negotiation and addition have been formally contested – would establish that plurilateral agreements can be adopted and added to the WTO rulebook without the consent of all members. Once that door is opened, the principle of consensus in WTO agenda-setting and rule-making will be effectively undermined.

Before and at MC14, the US refused to offer concessions on agriculture trade, S&DT or the longstanding mandated issues that matter to developing-country members. It refused to engage on fixing the WTO dispute settlement system it broke. Instead, it has been leveraging the ‘reform’ agenda to extract structural concessions that will tilt the WTO’s institutional machinery in its favour, while pursuing its trade interests bilaterally.

Besides advocating for plurilaterals at MC14, the US wanted a moratorium on customs duties on e-commerce transmissions to be made permanent while also expanding the scope of such transmissions. Over the course of the negotiations in Yaoundé, it revised its demands to extending the moratorium by four more years. Historically, the moratorium has been extended roughly every two years from one WTO ministerial conference to the next. Yet, the heavy-handedness of the US, the aggressive negotiating tactics it employed, as well as its refusal to offer anything in return, led to an impasse over this hot-button issue, which left MC14 with no outcome. (As a result, the moratorium has since expired.)

Both the institutionalisation of plurilaterals and the longer-term adoption of the e-commerce moratorium would have entailed developing countries giving up something concrete (MFN treatment, consensus-based decision-making, effective say over agenda-setting, customs revenue and regulatory autonomy in the digital economy) for nothing. Once plurilaterals are entrenched and the moratorium made permanent, the US would have a freer hand to set the WTO agenda without negotiating with developing-country and least-developed-country members. S&DT, already under pressure from demands to end self-designation and narrow its application, would recede further as a meaningful principle and integral part of the negotiations.

The reform agenda, for all its complexity, is secondary to the structural question: will the WTO remain a consensus-based institution where MFN and consensus decision-making ensure the smallest member has a say? Or will it be refashioned into a platform for variable-geometry agreements where the powerful set the terms and the rest face compliance or exclusion? This question remains key after MC14.

Developing countries have fought for decades to preserve a multilateral trading system in which trade could serve as a tool for their development. That system is now under direct threat – not from its irrelevance, but from a deliberate strategy to hollow it out from within.                                         

Goh Chien Yen and Kinda Mohamadieh are trade and investment lawyers at the Third World Network.

*Third World Resurgence No. 367, 2026/2, pp 16-17