This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, May 13th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Senator Josh Holly would like to remove the United States

from the World Trade Organization. what would be the economic consequences

for a U.S. economy already suffering greatly?

Does the WTO deliver in terms of resolving disputes among countries over trade.

Dan Eekinson directs the Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, he comments.

You know, I think that he and other nationalists hearken back to a day when the United States was the

preeminent economy in the world, the sole superpower really where life was simpler we didn't have to contend with

rising powers like China and and and thinks that many of America's problems lay at the feet of our engagement

internationally, of our openness that we've been taken advantage of.

You know, a lot of these post-war institutions

that were created under US tutelage,

like the general agreement on tariffs and trade,

which became the WTO and the UN and the

World Bank and the IMF, the nuclear umbrella that the United States

provided so that it would be easier for Europe and Japan to recover from the war and focus on economic growth.

There's this view that we were taken advantage of by flipping the bill for that as though, you know, resisting

Soviet expansionism and creating economic dynamism wasn't good for the United States. So it's the zero-sum

view of the world that everybody else who makes gains comes at America's expense and it's really not that way.

This is a mutually reinforcing, mutually beneficial relationship to have a global economy and to have rules that facilitate

our interactions in the global economy.

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