President Biden has said he plans to work with allies to keep pressure on China, but at the World Trade Organization the U.S. will be facing a rival in Beijing that has become a more dominant force in recent years.

Skepticism toward the WTO in successive U.S. administrations translated into policies, such as blocking judges to its top court, that have largely gutted its ability to serve as an international arbiter of trade disputes.

In a sign of their increasing frustration with global efforts to ensure that all people everywhere will have access to COVID-19 vaccines, several developing countries have asked other members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) to join them in a sweeping waiver of the intellectual property (IP) rights relating to those vaccines. Their waiver request raises anew the recurring debate within the WTO over the right balance between the protection of IP rights and access in poorer countries to urgently needed medicines.

“A modernized U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade pact took effect [last] Wednesday… The [USMCA] includes tighter North American content rules for autos, new protections for intellectual property, prohibitions against currency manipulation and new rules on digital commerce that did not exist when NAFTA launched in 1994.” (Reuters)

“A push by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) for a historic Senate vote on whether the U.S. should withdraw from the World Trade Organization appears to have been scuttled [last week] by a new parliamentarian ruling.” (Politico)