The World Trade Organisation is having a midlife crisis

Fixing the global trading system means first coming to grips with why it is broken

If the World Trade Organization were a person, it would be that dude at the bar drinking the afternoon away in his business suit and wondering where it all went wrong. He used to be a big shot.

When the W.T.O. was created in 1995 to write the rule book for international trade and to referee disputes between countries, it was popular and powerful. Unlike most international bodies, it has a dispute-resolution mechanism that was widely used. Its decisions had teeth. If W.T.O. judges decided that a country wasn’t playing by the rules, judges could authorize retaliatory tariffs so that