The international trade community is scrambling to recover and re-orient itself from the second Trump Administration's chaotic trade policy. It's January 2025 Inauguration Day "America First" Trade Policy, followed by multiple new tariff regimes, including the 2 April 2025 Liberation Day Reciprocity Tariffs, have altered unimaginably long-established multilateral and regional trade laws and norms. No country on earth is untouched by what has happened. 

Our expert panel will critically analyse (in a non-partisan, non-ad hominem manner) the implications of this policy for producer-exporters, buyer-importers, end-consumers, and governments. Does this policy spell the end of the GATT-WTO regime and major FTA relationships, such as USMCA (NAFTA 2.0)? Or, is it an opportunity to re-invigorate both, perhaps sans-America?
 
Our panel will focus on whether, how, and why (1) the blatant use of wholesale remedial tariffs that breach fundamental WTO principles and bound tariff obligations pose an existential threat to the rules based trading system, and (2) such tariffs may, paradoxically, catalyse a renewed interest around the world among governments and industry to re-dedicate themselves to GATT-WTO sanctioned trade remedies.
 
Our panel will address the perception that several high profile WTO disputes about the interpretation of trade remedy rules, especially those concerning AD, CVD, and safeguards, are insufficiently effective to deal with the trade practices of some WTO Members — such as industrial policy in China. Is that rationale, twinned with national security concerns, a justification for Trumpian tariff levies via unilateral trade remedies?
 
Our panel also will concentrate on how the lack of reforms for WTO rules (manifest in the failed Doha Round) has catalysed the evolution and mutation of trade remedies, and intensified their deployment, by key users. Whilst the WTO Dispute Settlement Body continues to generate important jurisprudence in defining and clarifying key concepts and parameters, there has been a surge of new forms of trade remedy tools – countervailing measures on cross-border subsidies, proliferation of “anti-circumvention” investigations, “particular market situation" inquiries, and — of course, America's use of its 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, and Section 30 of the Trade Act of 1974.
 
Are these legitimate responses to a vastly different trade world shaped by ever more powerful multinational corporations and state-backed industrial policies? Or are they regressive reactions that doom the liberalisation and development objectives of the founders of the 1947 GATT and 1995 WTO? Simply put, are trade remedies in a post-Liberation Day world a harbinger of a post-WTO world, a death knell for the multilateral trading system, or a welcome fillip for its reform?