Emerging powers and the world trading system: the past and future of international economic law

"Yet by 2020, twenty-five years after the WTO's creation, it was the United States that has become the great disrupter - disenchanted with the rules' constraints, including on its ability to create new rules. It was the United States that flouted WTO rules in the name of "national security" and the national interest - even to protect American producers of aluminum siding, and to pressure countries to block migration from Mexico and Central America. It was the United States that neutered trade dispute settlement and threatened to withdraw from the organization. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom - the E.U.'s second largest economy - voted by referendum to leave the European Union. As nationalist parties rose in prominence throughout Europe, the European Union was pressed to turn inward to protect its very existence, curtailing its role on the global stage. It continues to defend multilateralism, but it is in a much weaker position following the Euro crisis, internal divisions over migration, Brexit, and the ravages of the COVID-19 virus, than it was in the 1990s. Paradoxically, China, India, Brazil, and other emerging economies became stakeholders and (at times) defenders of economic globalization and the rules regulating it, even while they too have taken nationalist turns. Before the World Economic Forum in Davos, that paragon of global institutions, China's President Xi declared in his 2016 keynote address, "We must remain committed to developing global free trade and investment, promote trade and investment liberalization and facilitation through opening-up and say no to protectionism." How did this come to be? How did the emerging powers invest in trade law to defend their interests? What has this meant for their own internal economic governance? And what does it mean for the future of the trade legal order in light of intensified rivalry between the United States and China, triggering a new economic cold war?"