Toward best practices for trade-security measures

The global economy is increasingly being weaponized. Citing security concerns from traditional defence to economic competitiveness, health emergency, and climate crisis, states are turning to sanctions, tariffs, export controls, investment screening, and subsidies. But while economic statecraft is becoming common, rules remain scarce. Questions about notice, duration, proportionality, harm minimization, compensation, retaliation, and/or rebalancing lack clear answers and seem almost theoretical. Once, we might have hoped the World Trade Organization (WTO) would play a role in developing such rules. But in the absence of an Appellate Body and in the face of state rejections of review, WTO’s deliberative processes have ground to a halt. This essay argues for a new approach, focused less on adjudicating security disputes than on developing best practices for invoking and using trade security measures. It explains why a new approach is necessary, detailing both how the WTO’s deliberative engine broke down and why dispute settlement is ill-suited to develop guidance now needed. It suggests where and how best practices might be developed, before considering an agenda for such a best practice process. In the end, the hope is a process that can develop expectations—expectations that might make a world of economic statecraft a bit less dangerous.