CAN the WTO Still Matter in a Multipolar World?

There are diplomatic rituals, and then there are diplomatic autopsies. The 13th Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization, held last week in Abu Dhabi, increasingly resembled the latter. With no grand outcomes and even fewer illusions, MC13 confirmed what many suspected but few dared to say aloud: the WTO no longer governs global trade—it manages its fragmentation. 

The proceedings were neither chaotic nor overtly confrontational. Instead, they were marked by a slow bleed of purpose. Ministers from 164 member states engaged in negotiations that felt less like problem-solving and more like managing mutual exhaustion. The old multilateral consensus, forged in the hopeful aftermath of the Cold War, now lies buried beneath overlapping crises: geopolitical realignment, techno-nationalism, environmental bifurcation, and a deepening distrust between North and South.

What remains is an institution haunted by its own legacy—a body meant to universalize rules, now reduced to facilitating exceptions.

A Platform Without Power

The core takeaway from Abu Dhabi is not that the WTO is irrelevant, but that it is increasingly peripheral—not to trade volumes, which remain massive, but to trade governance, which is steadily slipping into ad hoc regionalism and bilateralism.
Consider the flashpoints: 

• India’s veto on fisheries subsidies reflects a broader South-South anxiety that “green conditionalities” are simply repackaged forms of Northern protectionism. For New Delhi and many others, conservation is not a multilateral goal but a sovereign prerogative, particularly when livelihoods are at stake. 

• The United States, while rhetorically committed to WTO reform, continues to paralyze the dispute settlement mechanism by blocking appellate appointments. Washington’s position is clear: it will not restore a system that limits its trade maneuverability—even as it insists on others playing by the rules. 

• The European Union, meanwhile, found itself at odds with African delegations over both agricultural protections and e-commerce frameworks. Brussels has championed digital rulesets favoring its data privacy model, but the Global South increasingly sees these as non-tariff barriers in disguise, designed to entrench technological dependency. 

This is not merely deadlock; it is systemic dislocation. The WTO was built to codify liberal economic norms—open markets, legal certainty, non-discrimination. But those norms have been eroded by a new reality: a multipolar world where power increasingly precedes procedure, and legitimacy derives less from law than from leverage.

The Rise of Minilateralism

In lieu of collective progress, MC13 saw the proliferation of issue-based coalitions and informal blocs. These may be the future of trade diplomacy: nimble, interest-driven, and unencumbered by consensus thresholds.

A Pacific coalition, including Australia, Chile, and New Zealand, pushed forward on green tech standardization—effectively drafting the rules of a post-carbon economy without waiting for WTO endorsement.
An African-led alliance proposed supply chain safeguards against extraterritorial sanctions, signaling growing frustration with great-power weaponization of trade tools.
Even Canada, typically a cautious multilateralist, was reportedly engaged in backchannel coordination on digital norms and sustainability incentives—while avoiding any explicit public positioning ahead of a contentious U.S. election year.

This strategic fragmentation is not inherently negative. It reflects the adaptive instincts of a system in decline: middle powers hedging, small economies banding together, and large players redefining their trade posture through geopolitical calculus rather than WTO jurisprudence.

But it also signals something deeper: the unraveling of legal multilateralism as a primary modality of economic diplomacy.

The WTO’s Existential Crisis

Can the WTO be salvaged? That depends on whether one sees it as a court, a club, or a custodian. 

As a court, it no longer functions. The dispute settlement mechanism is effectively inert, and no serious proposals exist to revive it in its original form.
As a club, its membership is too broad and ideologically fragmented to produce coherent agendas. The days of the “Quad” (U.S., EU, Japan, Canada) setting the tone are long gone.
As a custodian, it may endure—as a repository of trade data, a facilitator of technical assistance, and a platform for dialogue. But even this role is threatened by redundancy, as parallel institutions (such as the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework or the African Continental Free Trade Area) become more consequential.

In this light, the WTO’s future may resemble that of the League of Nations in its twilight years—not formally abolished, but steadily eclipsed.

Footnote from a World in Pain

While trade ministers debated subsidies and semiconductors in Abu Dhabi, over a hundred Palestinians were killed while waiting for flour in Gaza. Their deaths were not a topic of discussion, nor a footnote in the final communiqué. But they should have been.

Because this, too, is what a rules-based order is supposed to prevent—not just the unfair distribution of goods, but the intolerable distribution of suffering.

Human dignity is not a tradeable good. Yet international institutions continue to treat it as if it were—optional, negotiable, marginal. This is the deeper crisis: not that the WTO is failing, but that multilateralism itself is increasingly detached from the lived experiences it once claimed to uplift.

The End of Automatic Legitimacy

The WTO may survive—but survival is not significance. In a world where trade is shaped by tariffs, tech wars, and transnational turbulence, no institution can matter merely because it exists. Legitimacy, like relevance, must be earned anew.

If the WTO is to matter again, it must abandon nostalgia for the 1990s, confront the asymmetries of the present, and build governance structures that reflect—not resist—the geopolitical realities of the 2020s. That means empowering the Global South as co-authors of the rules, acknowledging that power asymmetries distort “free” trade, and recognizing that climate, conflict, and inequality are no longer tangents—they are the terms of engagement.

Until then, the WTO will continue to convene, to confer, and to quietly recede.

Next week: How the crisis in Haiti is being shaped not only by gangs and governance—but by a foreign policy vacuum few are willing to acknowledge.