Kremlin says WTO will be in doubt if US left

Trump has threatened to pull US out of WTO

MOSCOW: The Kremlin said on Wednesday that the existence of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) would be in serious doubt if major economies such as the United States left it, a prospect raised a day earlier by US President Donald Trump.

The Kremlin made the comment in response to a question about US media reports which said Trump had threatened on Tuesday to pull out of the WTO over what he described as the organisation's unfair treatment of the United States.

"It is obvious that the existence of keystone international economic organisations (like the WTO) would be called into serious question after the exit of the biggest economies on earth," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on a conference call.

Earlier on Tuesday, US President Donald Trump threatened to pull the United States out of the WTO if conditions were not improved.

"We will leave if we have to," Trump told a cheering audience of workers at a Shell chemical plant in Pennsylvania. "We know that they have been screwing us for years and it's not going to happen again," he said.



Trump has made the WTO the target of many previous attacks, and threatened before to withdraw, claiming unfair treatment towards the US and saying Washington does not have to abide by WTO rulings.

He was especially critical about the terms granted to China when it joined the organisation, given US complaints about Chinese theft of American technology.

But the United States in fact has a successful track record of winning disputes mediated by the global trading body.

While calling for reforms to the institution's rules, the Trump administration also had effectively paralysed its work.By blocking the naming of new members to the appellate panel part of the Dispute Settlement Body that arbitrates disputes, the system would grind to a halt by the end of the year.

Chad Bown, a trade expert with the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said the moves weakening the WTO had done "lasting damage", not all of which can be reversed.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 15^th, 2019.

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