Fifth Annual Symposium on Pop Culture and International Law: You Can’t Trade With Us – The United States, Trade Bullying, and the WTO

[Jyotsna Manohar is an international trade lawyer who holds an LLM in transnational law from King’s College London]

Welcome to the Cafeteria of Global Trade

Sometimes the most striking political commentaries come not from political thrillers or dystopian dramas but from a 97-minute comedy targeted towards a teenage audience. This is certainly the case with 2004’s Mean Girls, a movie in which a high school cafeteria is painted as a geopolitical landscape wherein power is brokered not by way of treaties, but through clique loyalty, aesthetic conformity, and lunch table exclusivity. This film follows the titular group of mean girls, known as ‘the Plastics’, led by one ‘queen bee’ Regina George, who runs the school with a series of arbitrary rules. Among other things, the movie tries to highlight the politics of surviving in a modern high school. Now, nearly two decades since the release of Mean Girls, the current state of trade diplomacy under the Trump administration is reminiscent of the themes and social dynamics explored in this film. 

Much like the high school cafeteria, where every clique and social group has their assigned lunch table, the World Trade Organization (WTO) is a forum where every member country has a seat at the proverbial table and the ability to trade freely with other members in a fair and non-discriminatory manner. This is ensured through various principles that underpin the WTO, such as the Most Favoured Nation (MFN) and National Treatment principles, as well as the general encouragement of transparency and predictability in the multilateral trading system. MFN requires that if a WTO member receives any special concession, for example lower customs duties on a certain product, then the same treatment must be extended to all other WTO members as well. National Treatment mandates that imported goods and services are treated no less favourably than their domestic equivalents once they have entered the market. These principles ensure fair competition, free trade, and also encourage development and economic reform in developing and least developed countries. However, recent years have seen a shift away from the WTO’s rules-based system, with States increasingly resorting to regional and preferential trade agreements, resulting in asymmetric power dynamics. By entering into such agreements, WTO member states are exempt from applying the MFN principle, which means that any preferential treatment given to another country by way of such agreements need not be extended to all other WTO members. The disruption of this established order and erosion of the MFN principle can also be attributed to the Trump administration’s ‘America First’ approach to the WTO and international trade diplomacy. 

The Regina George Approach to Trade Diplomacy 

The US administration, armed with a Burn Book of Executive Orders, has adopted a Regina George style of trade diplomacy, characterized by arbitrary and sometimes exclusionary policies, leveraging power asymmetries through trade-bullying tactics, and a general lack of transparency and predictability. Much like Regina’s rules – such as, on Wednesdays we wear pink, and no one is allowed to wear a tank top two days in a row – Trump 2.0’s trade policies seem arbitrary and lacking in any logical basis. In addition, the consequences of non-adherence to the rules result in the same penalty: “you can’t sit [trade] with us.”

This style of trade diplomacy has resulted in the fracturing of the established multilateral rules-based system and the erosion of the core principles of the WTO. The increasing preference for bilateral trade agreements also has the effect of defying the quintessential purpose of the WTO, which is to promote cooperative multilateral trade. Combined with arbitrary trade measures that are repeatedly amended, paused, or revoked, the Trump administration has been using these tactics to bully other countries into negotiating with the US on their terms. 

One such arbitrary policy is the imposition of reciprocal tariffs, which in itself is based on an incorrect understanding of trade deficits. The White House gives undue weightage to the impact of other countries’ national trade policies, and views the US trade deficit as a direct consequence of such policies. Such a view of trade deficits does not take into account other factors, such as non-tariff barriers, domestic taxes (for example, VAT), and other monetary factors (such as currency manipulation). This resulted in the Liberation Day Tariffs, where significant tariffs were incorrectly calculated and proposed to be levied on numerous countries. 

Another signature bullying tactic of the Trump administration has been to leverage power asymmetries to coerce their trading partners to negotiate (or in some cases re-negotiate) trade deals and accept the US’s unilateral terms. Indonesia’s recent trade deal with the US is exemplary of a country negotiating from a vulnerable position and accepting terms that may be detrimental to its own growth and development in order to avoid Trump’s tariffs. In spite of such an unequal trade-off, countries continue to negotiate deals with the United States. 

The film has a poignant line at around the midway mark: “it was better to be in with the Plastics, hating life, than to not be in it at all”. This sentiment seems to be mirrored by the global community as well, as we saw even the staunchest supporters of the WTO scrambling to finalize unequal trade deals with the Trump administration before the tariffs kicked into effect. Members, such as the UK and EU, continue to profess their commitment to the WTO and a rules-based multilateral trading system whilst simultaneously signing deals with the US that undermine its core principles. However, in light of the lives and livelihoods that hang in the balance, a degree of sympathy may be granted to these States that are seeking to secure their economic stability rather than maintain a principled stance at the expense of their domestic industries. 

Mathletes, BRICS,  and Social Suicide 

This brings us to some of the other characters in the film who dare to rise up against the Plastics, or at the very least refuse to play by their rules. The Mathletes is one such out-group of math students who don’t necessarily conform to the Plastics’ rules, but rather choose to pursue their own interests throughout the film.  

Much like joining the Mathletes in the movie is considered to be “social suicide”, it appears that aligning with certain geopolitical blocs is also a form of social (or in this case, diplomatic) suicide. BRICS+ is an intergovernmental organization comprising of Global South countries – including Brazil, Russia, India, and China – looking to strengthen economic, political, and social cooperation among its members. Given this objective, BRICS has often received criticism from the US that it challenges Western interests and thus could undermine the existing Western-led international order, including displacing the US dollar from its prominent position in the world economy. As a result, Trump has very publicly threatened to impose additional tariffs on countries that side with BRICS.

Similarly, the imposition of 50% tariffs on imports from India (the highest of any country apart from Brazil) purely to punish the country for continuing to purchase discounted oil from Russia, is telling of how the US seeks to use tariffs as a punitive tool to target countries aligning with those States deemed unfavourable by the Trump administration.  

In true high school fashion, you are only as popular as the friends you keep. 

Where are the Adults?

Amidst this chaotic playground politics, one begins to wonder: where are the adults and why is nobody trying to restore order to the system? 

The WTO, once a strong multilateral forum, now finds itself crippled since its “jewel in the crown”, the dispute settlement body, effectively became defunct. A central pillar of the WTO, the dispute settlement mechanism consisted of the Panel and Appellate Body (AB) to adjudicate WTO-related disputes. However, since 2017, the United States has been blocking the appointment of new AB members, thus effectively disabling any means of enforcing the WTO’s rules-based framework. The US has accused the AB of overstepping its mandate by judicializing the dispute settlement process, and has repeatedly rejected all proposals from other WTO members to address the US’s concerns and continues to block the appointment of new AB Members. 

With no way to enforce WTO rules, and Panel decisions being ‘appealed into the void’, some countries have set up the Multi-Party Interim Appeal Arbitration Arrangement (MPIA) as an alternative arbitration system to settle disputes in the interim. However, as this is done on a purely voluntary basis, it lacks the force to address Trump’s recent actions. 

Another prominent criticism that the 166-member WTO faces is its decision-making process, which is consensus-based, and as such may take years to conclude as every member effectively holds a veto. This includes any potential reforms to the WTO system itself. However, WTO members have not lost all hope yet, and in fact deep and thorough reform is on the agenda for the 14^th Ministerial Conference in 2026. Whether or not any consensus can be reached, and any reform can be instituted remains to be seen. 

Concluding Remarks

Despite its shortcomings, the WTO plays a key role in international trade. However, under President Trump, the United States has asserted its dominance in a way that undermines the cooperative and non-discriminatory framework that has underpinned the multilateral trading system for decades. This has resulted in global trade becoming less predictable, less free and fair, and more vulnerable to the whims and fancies of a few powerful States. 

Reform at the WTO is important now more than ever before, and it remains to be seen whether it can regain control of and restore order to the cafeteria of global trade. This largely depends on the willingness of its members, who, as we have seen, can often be torn between preserving their own economic and developmental goals and resisting the US’s bullying tactics to maintain a principled stance on preserving the integrity of the WTO.

Towards the end of the second act of Mean Girls, the high school teachers bring together all the students to address the bullying and victimization that they have faced under Regina George’s reign. It is still early days into Trump 2.0, and only time will tell if States can similarly unite against a common threat to the WTO and the multilateral system generally, or whether their self-interests will further fracture the existing cracks and doom the future of global trade to be subject to arbitrary rules such as: on Wednesdays we wear pink, and on every other day we declare a new tariff war?