Doha Dies?

It may not be officially dead, but today the Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations moved onto life support. In what effectively appears to be its death knell, the WTO suspended negotiations on all fronts, and press reports quote some negotiators as suggesting that it will be months, if not years, before they resume.

But, as I mentioned a few months back, the United States no longer has months to negotiate. President Bush’s “fast-track” trade promotion authority—under which Congress gives trade agreements an up-or-down vote in lieu of the more fluid regular legislative process—expires in mid-2007. For the President to have a text to send to Congress before fast-track expires, the consensus is that a general agreement was needed this month, to be followed by several months of negotiating the requisite individual commitments. Given that the United States was the party most under time pressure to complete a deal and that the United States agreed with its G-8 partners to direct their trade ministers to finalize a deal by the end of July, it’s curious that the talks broke down now and that other states are pointing the finger squarely at the United States (see here and here), citing its inability to move its position as the real reason the talks collapsed.

So, is Doha really dead? I’d welcome readers’ thoughts on whether there’s something we’re not seeing here. And what does the future of the multilateral trading regime hold? I had one colleague suggest that we’ll now see parties pay increasing attention to the WTO dispute settlement system, pushing to obtain through litigation what they were unable to obtain through legislation. Do others agree with this prognosis?