Globalization is stabilizing and solves a laundry list of impacts.

Finally, maintaining peace and security is particularly salient these days. The increasing weaponization of trade relations and policy has cast doubt on the long-standing proposition that trade brings peace. Countries are understandably worried about becoming dependent on potential adversaries for critical goods. But as has been made clear, limiting trade to a few partners comes with opportunity costs: higher prices, diminished export options, less productive resource allocation, and new kinds of supply vulnerabilities.

Meanwhile, deep and diversified markets make it harder to weaponize international trade, by reducing countries’ dependence on any single source of supply. When the war in Ukraine cut off nearly all of Ethiopia’s wheat imports from that country, Ethiopia was able to fill the gap with imports from Argentina and the United States. Europe has made up for the loss of piped Russian gas with imports of liquefied natural gas from other sources. In a reglobalized world economy, a diffuse production base for all manner of goods would mean even fewer potential chokepoints. One prerequisite for reglobalization is a broadly open and predictable global economy, anchored in a strong, rules-based multilateral trading system.

A FORCE FOR PEACE

International trade is neither the silver bullet that can solve all security problems nor the Achilles’ heel of the current security architecture. To abandon the many benefits that come with international trade would be foolhardy. There are real problems with the current trading system, but the counterfactual scenario is almost certainly worse: it is difficult to believe that international security would be better served if leading powers had no economic stake in one another’s stability and prosperity and no shared institutions in which to engage. Trade between the United States and China benefits people and businesses in both countries enormously and binds the superpowers together, both bilaterally and in international forums, providing an incentive to cooperate where possible and avoid conflict.

Strategic competition is a reality of the modern world. But that world will become unlivable unless there is also strategic cooperation. The WTO’s ministerial meeting last summer offered hope that the two can go together. The agreements reached there had the support of all WTO members. They worked across geopolitical and policy fault lines, each perceiving a national interest in reinforcing the world trading system.

In the three-quarters of a century since the world first embraced multilateral cooperation on trade, the trading system has underpinned rising—if still uneven—global prosperity. It has achieved its original goal of helping governments keep markets open in turbulent times. In the face of mighty shocks, from the global financial crisis to the pandemic, the world did not repeat the 1930s spiral of protectionism and depression, instead allowing cross-border demand and supply to be an engine for recovery.

Today, the multilateral trading system is part of the solution to major global challenges, from climate change to conflict to pandemic preparedness. And a reformed WTO, fit for the twenty-first century, is needed now more than ever, with rules that underpin the stability, predictability, and openness of the global trading system. If the past 15 years have taught us anything, it is that unforeseen crises surely lie ahead and that without the stabilizing force of trade, the world will almost certainly be less able to weather them.