The World Trade Organization (WTO), created in 1995 as a successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, stands at the centre of the global trade regime. As an institution, the WTO now faces two major, intertwined challenges. The first challenge, which has also captured the most attention, began with the second Trump administration in early 2025. With the imposition of (new) tariffs across the membership, and particularly against China, the US administration has directly challenged one of the WTO’s core norms – the Most-Favoured-Nation principle – and has taken steps to free itself from the constraints of the multilateral trade system. The effects of this shift remain to be seen as the volatility of US trade policy at the time of writing makes predicting the long-term impacts on the WTO impossible. Yet these measures undermine the robustness and viability of the WTO.
The second challenge – which is the focus of this report – is a longer-term challenge linked to a geopolitical clash between certain WTO members: between the US and China in particular, and more broadly, between the largely Western, developed-country members and the developing-country members. This tension underpins problems with low effectiveness, which the WTO has been facing since the mid-2000s, and which have become more prominent in negotiations since 2015 and in dispute settlement since 2019. This geopolitical tension and the geopoliticisation of global trade – along with the rise of economic nationalism and an inward turn in a number of key member states, including the US and China – provide crucial context for any meaningful debate on transforming or defending the WTO.
WTO reform has been on the organisation's agenda since at least the 2015 and 2017 Ministerial Conferences, but a recognition of the need to update the organisation pre-dates these meetings. This report covers the WTO’s overall efforts towards reform and outlines the space available for institutional transformation and defence of the organisation at large.
What are the prospects and limitations for meaningful reform of the WTO, particularly in terms of its institutional robustness and effectiveness?
Based on nearly 40 semi-structured interviews carried out in late 2024 and early 2025 with representatives of WTO members and WTO Secretariat staff, the authors finds that:
- Reform attempts targeting new rules and dispute settlement have so far largely failed.
- There is very limited space available for enhancing effectiveness of these legalised dimensions of the WTO’s work.
- Modest achievements in effectiveness only seem possible within activities that are predominantly informal, deliberative, and focus on information exchange.
- Key WTO members radically disagree on what an effective WTO should be achieving.
In the face of the direct challenges presented by the second Trump administration, a focus on the WTO’s effectiveness and robustness – as well as its actual survival – may come to the fore. The third central concept in our ENSURED project – democracy – is largely associated with the participation of state and non-state actors, and with accountability mechanisms in global governance. Considerations involving (increased) democratic governance at the WTO have not been a central focus for WTO members in recent years, and thus the issue is only briefly touched on in this report.
Citation Recommendation: Parizek, Michal and Clara Weinhardt. 2025. “Revitalising and Reforming the World Trade Organization in an Age of Geopolitics.” ENSURED Research Report, no. 5 (May): 1-32. https://www.ensuredeurope.eu
*This is one of five research reports on global governance published by ENSURED in May 2025. Read the others to learn about UNFCCC decision-making, vaccine equity and the public health-intellectual property nexus, the UN Human Rights Council, and cyberspace governance.
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