Doha Round of WTO Negotiations Reaches An Impasse

The increasingly fragile U.S. and world economies got a big piece of good news last week when the Doha Round of world trade talks once again broke down. Like vampires, these negotiations, conducted under the auspices of the World Trade Organization, are excruciatingly difficult to kill off once and for all.

But any kind of Doha revival effort seems unlikely for at least one year, given the rapid approach of the U.S. presidential election, the certainty of a new administration in January, and the development of stagflation-like conditions in the United States. As a result, an exciting opportunity has emerged to craft a new U.S. trade strategy that contributes to healthy, sustainable national and global growth – by promoting domestic U.S. production.

What’s bad for Doha is good for the United States and the rest of the world because these multilateral negotiations epitomized practically everything wrong with U.S. trade policy for at least fifteen years – when NAFTA opened a misbegotten new chapter in American economic history.