Chinmaya IAS Academy – Current Affairs Chinmaya IAS Academy – Current Affairs
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The time has come for the developing world to have a greater say
While Bretton Woods institutions were to embed the new financial trade order, U.S. Treasury department official, Harry Dexter White, and economist John Maynard Keynes had more than just the regulation of the international monetary system in mind at the time. An International Trade Organisation (ITO) was also to be created to establish multilateral rules for the settlement of trade disputes. Adherence to the rules of an international trade organisation was expected to serve as an important domestic incentive (and imperative) for governments by allowing them to resist protectionist demands and provide for greater legal certainty. Successive multilateral conferences were held between 1946 and 1948, and led to the adoption of the Havana Charter, a draft agreement for the creation of the ITO. But the ITO never came into existence as it was eventually rejected by the U.S. when, in 1950, President Harry Truman announced that he would not submit the Havana Charter to the Congress. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) came to replace the ITO, interestingly as an ad hoc and provisional mechanism.
The U.S.’s ire
Four decades later, the U.S. drove the agenda to establish the World Trade Organisation (WTO) purely to pursue its own commercial interests. The U.S. has been long proven isolationist and has never truly embraced the idea of a multilateral system in which its leadership could be contested. So the recent ire against its very creations, from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and the less recent disenchantment with NATO or UNESCO, is not surprising.
Source : https://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-opinion/the-problem-at-the-wto/article24610569.ece
