Some European Union leaders discussed a rethinking of the World Trade Organization, the entity at the center of the global trading system, at the European Council meeting on Thursday night in Brussels.
“If the WTO continues to be incapable of working,” German Federal Chancellor Friedrich Merz said, the EU has “to come up with something else.”
The suggestion underscores the rapid changes to the global trading system in recent years, and in particular since President Donald Trump returned to office in January and imposed sweeping global tariffs on US trading partners.
The WTO has more than 160 member countries, including the United States, the UK, Germany, Brazil, South Korea, Japan, Canada and Mexico. But Trump has long been critical of the organization,saying in 2018that it “has been a disaster for this country.” And now, Trump’s economic tariffs plan has thrown global trade into disarray.
European leaders on Thursday presented different options for trade agreements with other nations.
“We can think about this as a beginning of redesigning the WTO… understanding what should be reformed for the positive in WTO, so not repeating mistakes,” said Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission.
An example could be the CPTPP, or the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, involving Asian countries.
The idea was to have Europeans create “a new form of trade organization that gradually replaces what we don’t have with the WTO anymore,” Merz said.
“It’s just rudimentary, this idea,” Merz continued.