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No, that was not Don McLean singing his signature song, itself a landmark in contemporary music history. Strangely enough, it was US President Donald J. Trump. He was not singing either, nor humming, nor even orchestrating the audience as he always does in his campaign speeches. He was standing on another landmark, a global platform built by the United States that he has threatened to demolish: the United Nations.
The occasion was the General Assembly annual meeting, the largest gathering of dignitaries: leaders from 197 members take the opportunity, if they can, to update their colleagues on how their country fared the past year as a U.N. member. To fit so many, 5-6 odd minutes are given each, by etiquette. Trump, of course, rallied beyond an hour, receiving more snickers than all his US predecessors put together. Unlike those predecessors-- some of whom toiled to build, defend or promote the world body, others more disillusioned kept a distance-- Trump, ready to pull the plug, took the occasion to announce the end of multilateralism and globalisation, and thereby US leadership.
Anyone abreast of his twittering, public speeches, and policy measure will know he is ready, willing, and able to draw the curtains on the United Nations, at least when the US mid-term election is just around the corner. Much has already been said about China-- not just challenging US leadership, but also narrowing the gap between the two (within a decade or so, it is projected to displace the United States, after one century, as the world's largest, since it is already has the largest banking sector), and how his 'America First' has been haunting just about everything the 21st Century stands for, from multilateral preferences and multinational organisations to technological breakthroughs. Although the United Nations has been targeted by previous presidents, the United States still supplies one-quarter of all UN income. Yet, the attention here is the World Trade Organisation, also placed under the US guillotine by Trump.
WTO fatherhood/guardianship correctly belongs to the United States. It was born in January 1995 when the United States and the European Union laid down their trade weapons, particularly over agriculture, after almost one-decade of stalemated talks. Those negotiations were part of the Uruguay Round, from September 1986, the eighth 'round' of negotiations under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Of course, the GATT body itself emerged, unwittingly at that, on an ad-hoc basis when the first multilateral trade negotiations began in Geneva in 1947, but could not deliver the International Trade Organisation (ITO), in Havana next year. Deep differences between what became the British Commonwealth countries and the United States over, especially agriculture (in this case, wool, particularly exports from Australia), left the 23 participating countries to somehow patch irreconcilables.
National interests (actually the interests of uncompetitive domestic groups, particularly US farming) vetoed outright multilateralism. Since the delegates came so close to a breakthrough, the multilateral ship was not abandoned, converting the Geneva deliberations into an ad-hoc GATT working document. The problem was, they were so close not just to a breakthrough which never came, but also to a military showdown elsewhere that fortunately did not happen: East Europe was taken by Soviet communists, West Europe was threatened, and attention, which shifted completely to defending 'western' interests through the Truman Doctrine, in 1947, then gravitated towards the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), from 1949, rather than any ITO revival; and British resistance to US post-war multilateral plans wilted under economic pressures, soothed, no less, by the US Marshall Plan, also from 1947 (worth $16 billion then for all of West Europe, but obviously worth over $183 billion today, adjusting for a 3.4 per cent annual inflation rate since then).
With the security dust settling somewhat by the mid-1950s, economically vibrant West European countries became more receptive to multilateral trade. Accordingly, the GATT Geneva 'round' in 1947 was retrospectively dubbed the 'first', with the second, third, and fourth 'rounds' following in Annecy, Torquay and Geneva, during 1949, 1951 and 1956. They pushed multilateral trade glacially, rather than through the 'gushes' of deals done in 1947 (when 45,000 concessions were made), or would do later. Piecemeal by piecemeal, negotiators pushed the ghosts of nationalism and isolationism backward by liberating one manufactured product after another from forbidding protectionist measures: by the time the most successful 'rounds', the three-year Kennedy Round, involving 62 countries, ended in 1967, tariffs on manufactured trade had been slashed, while anti-dumping procedures began to take shape. Attention shifted to non-tariff barriers (NTBs) to the Tokyo Round (1973-79), attended by 102 countries. Progress there left the most sensitive sectors for the Uruguay Round (so called because the first meeting was in Punta del Este in that country): more NTB concessions, agriculture and emergent services.
Although itself a stubborn practitioner of selective and long-term protection, the United States played an intrinsic and irreversible role in this liberalisation. It again resurrected a multilateral order from near death and widespread neglect. First expressed at Bretton Woods, in New Hampshire, where top British and US negotiators (Lord Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White), built two multilateral financial institutions still operational today, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank; and scheduled the commercial counterpart for Geneva, from 1947. When the Kennedy Round ended, average US tariffs were reduced from 60 per cent (established for over 20,000 products by the 1930 Hawley-Smoot legislation), the second highest level in US history after the one in 1830, to less than 6.0 per cent. Without this, the United States would not have become the largest export market for just about every major trading country in the world, and equally, would not have been accepted as the world leader by the rest of that world. Japan would not have risen into the second-largest economy in the world after the Soviet Union collapsed from 1989, edging its key European rival, Germany, until it was overtaken by China; and nor would the world's second-largest exporter, Germany, have claimed that spot, until, of course, China snatched that away too.
Agriculture had been the historical contention-bone. Yet, through the Uruguay Round, on the strength of its bio-technological innovations boosting farm production, the United States relented even on this front. Some consequences were clear: conflict with the European Community's starkly protectionist Common Agricultural Policy, which merely fed French farming interests, but taxed Britain and other members so much that Brexit became a logical outcome in the former, uneasiness prevailed elsewhere, while Poland becoming its biggest free-rider. Everyone felt the Uruguay Round would bring relief, especially if the 1947 Geneva ghost could be overcome. The eighth 'round' was the longest, but thankfully the last.
Whereas the World Trade Organisation (WTO) was born amid the longest phase of US growth (1992-2000) in the entire 20th Century, it was hijacked by China (a trading country which "came in from the cold," subverting many WTO subverting practices). More strong economies awaited the 1990s than ever since World War II, a massive US credit. Disowning it in 2018 is to foreclose the future: the United States might profit over the short-term (enough for Trump to get re-elected), but the uneducated choice by one of the most educated populations today predicts long-term disaster.
Negotiations keep doors open; shutting them suffocates all.
Dr Imtiaz A Hussain is Professor & Head of the Department of Global Studies & Governance at
Independent University, Bangladesh.