Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

26. Trade · Notable · Needs Congress · Contested — excluded from counts

Create a WTO successor open only to liberal democracies

Not started

801 26. Trade · from “The Case for Free Trade”

“Create a successor to the WTO (assuming that it has been fatally wounded) that is open only to liberal democracies. This would prevent authoritarian countries like China from abusing the organization for their own ends.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    No successor organization exists, and none was proposed. The phrase "Global Free Trade Alliance" returns nothing in any Federal Register document type published since 2025-01-20, and no bill in the 119th Congress carries it. What the administration did instead is argue for plurilateral agreements *inside* the WTO — section 4 of the U.S. reform paper of 2026-03-23 is titled "Finding a Pathway for Plurilateral Agreements" — and, outside it, begin designing a single-sector plurilateral: USTR asked for comments on the design of a plurilateral agreement on trade in critical minerals on 2026-02-26, and concluded bilateral Action Plans with Japan (2026-03-19) and the European Union (2026-04-24) that name a binding plurilateral critical-minerals agreement as the goal. A sectoral agreement among willing partners is not a successor to the WTO, and membership in none of these instruments is conditioned on being a liberal democracy.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • Contested Recommendation from “The Case for Free Trade”; requires Congress.
  • The near miss is worth naming so a later pass does not mistake it for the ask: the administration is building plurilateral arrangements among like-minded partners, which is the shape of the Quote’s Global Free Trade Alliance, but it is doing so sector by sector (critical minerals) and inside the WTO’s architecture, and Ambassador Greer’s MC14 statement of 2026-03-30 says the United States “will work outside of the WTO with all interested partners” on e-commerce — all interested partners, not only liberal democracies.
  • Negative searches are in docs/research/ch-26.md under the p. 801 cluster.
  • Read 2026-09-03 (read-queue ticket 04): USTR’s current agreements list, and it cuts against the ask’s premise rather than towards it. https://ustr.gov/trade-agreements/agreements-reciprocal-trade (read 2026-09-03, undated) carries no successor-organization initiative and no like-minded-bloc initiative. The counterparties are the point: Cambodia, Bangladesh and Jordan are not the “liberal democracies” the Quote describes, and the instrument the administration is actually using is a bilateral hub-and-spoke, which is the opposite shape to a multilateral body with a membership qualification. Same stated limit as #2117 and #2120 — the negative reaches USTR’s published agreements, not its negotiating pipeline, because the “Agreements Under Negotiation” page 403s and has been dropped from USTR’s own navigation.
Action
create
Object
Successor organization to the World Trade Organization (Global Free Trade Alliance)
ID
2104