The World Trade Organization’s (WTO) September 2003 meeting in Cancún, Mexico, had barely collapsed before major corporations and their government and media mouthpieces launched into damage control: Blame developing nations—those countries making up the majority of wto members, and that U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick dismissed as “won’t do” countries—for defending their interests. Blame Mexico’s Foreign Minister Luis Ernesto Derbez, who hosted the meeting. Or blame advocacy groups and nongovernmental organizations.

This blame game is a wasteful distraction from the reality that, after nine years of existence, business as usual at the WTO is over.
To overcome opposition when the WTO was established in 1995, promoters promised benefits eerily similar to those trotted out before Cancún: billions of dollars in global economic growth and the reduction of poverty in poor nations. Not only has the WTO failed to deliver on such promises, but numerous countries are suffering economic, environmental, and social harm after implementing the global body’s mandates. This harm highlights the WTO’s key contradiction: Shouldn’t those living with the results determine the policies versus having them imposed by the WTO?

Not according to the old powers that be. In the run-up to Cancún, a bloc of powerful economies—the European Union, Japan, the United States, and Canada—plotted with the allegedly neutral WTO secretariat to set the agenda in advance. Their plan was not to negotiate, but to dictate four more WTO agreements that have little to do with trade and that require signatories to rewrite their domestic laws to conform even more to a “Washington Consensus” set of one-size-fits-all policies. Developing countries were expected to provide more privileges for...