WITA’s Friday Exchange: Sunrise, Sunset, Swiftly Flows the Trade News: Europe, India, China and the WTO
On April 2nd, 2025 President Trump Announced his “Liberation Day” Tariffs and to paraphrase Hamilton (the musical, not the statesman) the world of trade turned upside-down. This week, WITA welcomed back the Trade Reporters to discuss this monumental year in trade.
Featured Speakers:
Shawn Donnan, Senior Writer, Bloomberg
David Lynch, Global Economics Correspondent, The Washington Post and the author of the new book The World’s Worst Bet: How the Globalization Gamble Went Wrong (And What Would Make It Right)
Ana Swanson, Trade and International Economics Correspondent, New York Times
Koen Verhelst, Trade Reporter, POLITICO Europe
Moderator: Michael Smart, Managing Director, Rock Creek Global Advisors
Watch the Video on YouTube | Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
04/2/2026 | WITA
The WTO Limps Out of MC14
MC14 ended with a whimper. The latest Ministerial Conference (MC) for the World Trade Organization (WTO) took place over the weekend in Yaoundé, Cameroon.
Expectations of a successful summit were never high. Getting 166 members to agree on what a reform agenda would mean for the WTO was a tough challenge.1 In the end, nothing was decided, except to continue discussions. By the time members limped out of town and headed back to capitals and the WTO’s headquarters in Geneva, the institution was nearly unable to even hold a closing ceremony.
The ignominious failure of the global agenda, however, was offset by some important advancements alongside the meetings.
First, a substantial subset of members announced their intention to proceed with the implementation of an Electronic Commerce Agreement (ECA). The 66 participants pledged that they would start domestic ratification necessary to bring the deal into force.2
This is the long-awaited conclusion of work on digital trade, launched at MC11 (the WTO’s MCs are numbered by their biennial sequence) in 2017 under the leadership of Singapore, Australia, and Japan.3 At that time, members had grown increasingly concerned about the gap in global rules coverage for all things digital.
03/31/2026 | Deborah Elms | The Hinrich Foundation
‘Broken’, ‘Moribund’ — Journalists Need a Better Thesaurus on the WTO
Journalists are reaching for the wrong thesaurus when trying to describe the World Trade Organization (WTO) at its Ministerial Conference in Yaoundé. As a result, they come up with words like “broken” (Politico) or “moribund” (Financial Times).
There are a few honourable exceptions, such as Alan Beattie, also in the Financial Times, with his brilliant “stratospherically high words-to-action ratio” on talk about what to do with the WTO.
Is the WTO broken? Yes, but only partly, in the sense of a car that is broken with somewhere between a damaged satnav and a misfiring spark plug. It can still transport us, not as fast or as accurately as we would like, but at least it can get us to some places where we want to be.
Did Donald Trump break the WTO? No.
Is it near death? Let’s look at its vital signs.
$35 trillion per year in international trade
The WTO’s purpose is to help trade to flow as freely as possible. It continues to do that. Close to US$35 trillion-worth in goods and services flows around the world annually, most of it within WTO rules.
Could it do better? Of course. But $35 trillion is a lot already.
The WTO helps it avoid too much disruption because hundreds of delegates from its member governments meet at the Geneva headquarters every day to examine a wide range of issues, from Japan revoking “zinc bacitracin and calcium halofuginone polystyrenesulfonate as a feed additive” to the Czech Republic changing its laws on “audiovisual works and support for cinematography”.
03/26/2026 | Peter Ungphakorn | Trade β Blog
From Pax Americana to Pax Silica
The U.S. is advancing Pax Silica and redefining geopolitical order around compute, technological chokepoints and dependence.
Pax Romana. Pax Britannica. Pax Americana. Each marked an era in which a dominant power underwrote order through control of the systems on which prosperity depended. In December 2025, Washington reached for this lineage again. With the launch of Pax Silica, the United States announced that the foundation of the global order had shifted. Power in the 21st century would no longer rest primarily on oil, steel or one nation’s aircraft carriers, but on compute (computational power), semiconductors and the minerals and infrastructure that sustain artificial intelligence at scale.
The symbolism was deliberate. When Jacob Helberg, the Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment declared that “if the 20th century ran on oil and steel, the 21st century runs on compute,” he was not merely describing a technological trend. Pax Silica is not an industrial policy program, nor a traditional alliance. It is an attempt to reorganize the technologies used globally around American-controlled chokepoints – and, in doing so, to redefine what alignment, sovereignty and dependence mean in the AI age.
From free trade to managed dependence
For three decades after the Cold War, the U.S. approached global technology supply chains primarily as efficiency problems – optimizing for cost and scale while assuming geopolitical disruption was a tail risk rather than a design constraint.
That model unraveled in stages: first as China emerged as a strategic rival; then during the Covid-19 pandemic, which exposed how concentrated supply chains failed under stress; and finally with the recognition that advanced AI is not simply another digital service, but a general-purpose capability with direct military, economic and political consequences. Once AI came to be understood as an infrastructure of power, treating its supply chain as a neutral market outcome became untenable.
Pax Silica represents the most explicit break yet with the post-1990s era. Rather than attempting to reshore everything – a task that is economically infeasible – the U.S. is pursuing something more selective: control over the narrow points where the entire system can be constrained. Scale matters, but chokepoints matter more.
03/30/2026 | Uri Gabai | Geopolitical Intelligence Services AG
Beijing Hold’em: European Cards Against Chinese Coercion
Dependency is vulnerability. In 2025, European industry learnt this the hard way when the Chinese government used its monopoly on rare earths as a geoeconomic weapon. Beginning in April and expanded in October, measures suddenly required automotive suppliers, wind turbine manufacturers, defence producers and advanced machinery firms to have export licenses from the Chinese commerce ministry for certain rare-earth materials and permanent magnets. To obtain these licences, firms had to disclose sensitive commercial information. Inventories emptied, production lines slowed and parts of Europe’s industrial base faced a crisis.
Then on October 30th, at a summit between US president Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, China announced a one-year pause on the second round of measures it had introduced just a few weeks earlier. These had expanded controls to a vast number of technologies needed for mining, processing, refining and recycling rare earths, along with battery technologies and industrial machinery. Business relief was palpable, even though rare-earth trade has recovered only slightly and licensing remains difficult.
It was not the diplomatic envoys from Berlin, Brussels or Paris who were responsible for this respite. While it was the Trump administration’s aggressive trade and technology policy that triggered China’s escalation in the first place, it was also its quick counter-escalations that brought about the economic detente. Even though some European companies benefited from this deal, the EU did not craft it nor is it negotiating its extension. Yet Europe’s defence and industrial bases continue to rely on China for almost all their rare-earth products and technologies, as well as other key imports like pharmaceuticals, semiconductors and energy equipment. On top of this, a flood of Chinese exports into the single market is causing a historic rout in EU manufacturing jobs and risking deindustrialisation across the continent.
Read the Full Policy Brief Here
03/31/2026 | Tobias Gehkre & Nina Schmelzer | European Council on Foreign Relations
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