Hawley and the logic of U.S. sovereignty concerns
In a New York Times jeremiad, Missouri Senator Josh Hawley calls for the abandonment of the World Trade Organization:
Enough is enough. The W.T.O. should be abolished, and along with it, the new model global economy. The quest to turn the world into a liberal order of democracies was always misguided. It always depended on unsustainable American sacrifice and force of arms. And its companion economic order has, in similar vein, succeeded mostly in weakening American workers and industry.
As trade expert Joel Trachtman points out, Hawley’s history of the organization is misleading at best.
But there is also a logic to the extension of conservative sovereignty concerns to the WTO. It always struck me as odd in the late 1990s and early 2000s that so much of conservative ire was directed at the United Nations when the WTO had acquired (with U.S. approval of course) a binding dispute settlement process able and willing to rule against the United States (and in some consequential ways).
Since at least the mid-1980s (when the Reagan administration withdrew its acceptance of compulsory jurisdiction at the International Court of Justice), the United States has attempted in a variety of ways to remove itself from binding international legal judgements. That same concern lay behind the bipartisan resistance to joining the International Criminal Court. In that context, the WTO has been something of an outlier. If Hawley has his way, that incongruity will be corrected.