The migration deal imposed on Mexico this week by U.S. President Donald Trump under the threat of punitive tariffs was a victory for “hostage-taking” over international rules, a former head of the World Trade Organization (WTO) said on Saturday. […]
“My reaction is it seems that hostage-taking works. That’s my reaction,” Pascal Lamy, a former director-general of the WTO, told Reuters in a telephone interview, saying that Trump’s actions went against the spirit of international diplomacy.
“If there’s a rule of law, it’s because people believe it’s better than the law of the jungle. And many people don’t like the law of the jungle because some are strong, some are weak, and they don’t want the strong to always step on the weak.”[…]
Turning to Trump’s clashes with the WTO, Lamy said it was still not clear whether the U.S. president was more interested in reforming the organization, or neutralizing it. Lamy said Trump had complaints worth heeding, noting that some WTO rules currently made it hard to constrain Chinese trade practices that have caused frictions.
But he said the rest of the world needed a fallback plan if the United States decided not to abide by international rules.
“The others have to find a way to stabilize the multilateral rules-based system,” he said, “even if the U.S. want to kill it.” Läs artikel