LONDON — Britain’s man in Geneva is quietly trying to fix the global trading system — without angering President Donald Trump. As World Trade Organization (WTO) members stumble toward a long-anticipated reform effort, U.K. Ambassador Kumar Iyer is working to modernize the organization’s rulebook. Iyer’s vision for WTO reform ahead of its big biennial conference in March centers on shaking up the way the 30-year-old U.N. body enforces the rules of global trade. Speaking to POLITICO earlier this month, Iyer said he wants to have a system “where not everything is always held back by consensus and not everything requires everyone to agree […] and it’s not negatively impacting a range of countries.” Brussels has flirted with building an alternative “rules-based” trade order that would bring together the EU and the Indo-Pacific trade bloc that the U.K. joined last year — an alliance that sidelines Washington, long accused of paralyzing the WTO’s dispute system. Ministers representing the two trade blocs are meeting in Melbourne, Australia, this week for their first official joint dialogue. Kumar Iyer’s vision for WTO reform ahead of its big biennial conference in March centers on shaking up the way the 30-year-old U.N. body enforces the rules of global trade. | Martial Trezzini/EPA But Iyer is keen to downplay talk of an anti-Trump alliance. “We’re really comfortable with other countries having those [agreements],” he said. “But they’re not an alternative to the multilateral system.” ‘BUSINESSES’ FOCUS IS NOW ELSEWHERE’ Iyer’s frustration over attitudes towards the WTO is clear — especially with what he sees as corporate indifference toward the organization, leading to its deprioritization in global politics. “CEOs and corporate leaders have stopped looking towards the WTO as being on the forefront of global trade policy,” he said. “They’ll look at CPTPP […] — that’s where the board-level focus has gone, and that’s very understandable.” EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen first floated the idea of a wider alliance with CPTPP members in June during EU trade talks with the U.S. She argued that the bloc could “show to the world that free trade with a large number of countries is possible on a rules-based foundation.”  Still, Iyer insists that no new alliances can replace the WTO — or its role as the foundation of the global trade system.  “No FTA is even possible without the WTO,” he said. “The WTO is the operating system, and FTAs are essentially the applications that sit on it. Saying you only need CPTPP is like saying I’ve got Microsoft Word and Excel, so I don’t need Windows.” With the WTO’s next ministerial conference fast approaching, officials are steeling themselves for bruising negotiations on several issues, ranging from e-commerce to agriculture and fisheries.  Washington, however, remains the main obstacle. The U.S. has for years blocked the appointment of new judges to the WTO’s top appeals court, effectively paralyzing one of its core functions in trade dispute settlement.  “This isn’t about coming out with a big bang change immediately,” Iyer said of the coming reform talks. “It’s about getting that political engagement around it and showing a real, genuine willingness.”

BRUSSELS — Donald Trump’s tariffs have stung both the EU and India into mounting a big push to get their long-delayed trade deal over the line — fast.   Brussels and New Delhi only have three months left to deliver on their joint pledge to seal a deal by the end of the year — with the toughest issues related to agriculture and sustainability yet to be resolved.   Despite unprecedented political will, policymakers and experts alike recognize it won’t be an easy run to the finish line.   “The negotiations remain extremely challenging,” the EU’s lead negotiator Christophe Kiener told European lawmakers last week. “It was absolutely expected that when we start negotiating on the most difficult issues, the most sensitive areas, it would not be easy.”   As crunch time approaches, with another round of talks scheduled for next week, here are five things to know:  1. There’s renewed appetite on both sides — thanks to Trump.  Spurred by Trump’s tariff crusade, which hit Indian imports with tariffs as high as 50 percent and didn’t spare the EU either — albeit with a lower rate of 15 percent on most goods — both sides are frantically hunting for alternative trade partners.  “When we knew Trump would come into office, Delhi started sending smoke signals to capitals across Europe saying: We are serious about trade and we want to make this work to hedge against the uncertainties of tariffs and the U.S.’s commerce-first approach,” said Garima Mohan, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund who leads the think tank’s work on India.  Roger that, said Brussels.   Taking her whole College of Commissioners to India a few weeks into Trump’s second mandate, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi agreed to seal a deal by the end of the year — something even they recognized would be a steep target.   “It will not be easy. But I also know that timing and determination counts, and that this partnership comes at the right moment for both of us,” von der Leyen said at the time.   The EU has been on a negotiation roll, revamping its pact with Mexico, and concluding talks with the South American bloc of Mercosur countries and with Indonesia.   2. The two have a complicated trade history.  While India is playing hard to get, it is nonetheless seeking to overcome some of its protectionist instincts, deepening ties with Japan and negotiating a deal with Australia. A deal with the EU, its second-largest trading partner, remains a key objective. But historically, their trade relationship has never been easy.   “I know from experience how difficult India can be, how difficult it is to strike the final deal on the more sensitive issues. I suspect that that’s where we are now,” said Ignacio García Bercero, the EU’s chief negotiator for India until 2013. That’s when talks went into snooze mode over thorny issues such as India’s agricultural protectionism and its generic pharmaceuticals. They were relaunched at India’s request in 2022.   Although negotiators stress things are different this time around, they can’t escape sometimes conflicting economic approaches given India’s protectionist history.   “If we look at what is left, it’s the most important stuff … those are exactly the same things that we were dealing with in 2012, 2013, when the negotiations derailed last time,” said Nicolas Köhler-Suzuki, associate researcher at the Jacques Delors Institute.  3. Ukraine isn’t making things any easier.  While Brussels is counting on India for its diversification push, it won’t find it easy to remain a credible threat to Russia while doing more business with a country that maintains historically close ties with Moscow.  An EU official, granted anonymity to discuss closed-door discussions, conceded “one of the biggest issues where [the EU and India] have differences is Ukraine.”  The world’s most populous country sent 65 troops this month to join Russia’s annual Zapad military exercise, in which the Kremlin simulated a nuclear attack on NATO countries. At a recent summit in China, Modi held hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin as they approached their host, President Xi Jinping.  At a recent summit in China, Narendra Modi held hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin as they approached their host, President Xi Jinping. | Pool photo by Suo Takekuma via AFP/Getty Images Trump, meanwhile, is calling on the EU to hit New Delhi with tariffs as high as 100 percent for enabling Russia’s war in Ukraine.   “It’s not all joyous music and singing and dancing. There is an acknowledgement that we need to do more to bridge gaps where they are,” the official said, referring to a communication on India the EU executive put out in mid-September.  Ultimately, by engaging with India, the intention is to ensure the gap left by the U.S. isn’t filled by other, politically hostile, powers.  For India, giving up its ties to Russia is a no-go, as that would constitute a major concession to China, India’s long-standing Asian rival.   “The Russia-China factor is a huge concern for India,” said Mohan.  4. There’s a bunch of tricky technical bits.   Aside from the geopolitics, divergences are also creeping up in a host of nitty-gritty areas.   For one, there are long-standing disagreements on cars and car parts, wines and spirits, and other agricultural products. Earlier this year, the two sides agreed to set aside particularly sensitive agricultural sectors, such as dairy and sugar, to facilitate the talks.   On top of that come other issues related to agriculture, such as sanitary and phytosanitary measures. The EU also takes issue with the Indian Quality Control Orders, which prescribe that certain products must conform to Indian standards before being sold there.  Sustainability provisions and the EU’s green agenda are also complicating the negotiations.   “India had been clear from the outset that it did not particularly like the way the European Union wants to link sustainability-related issues and trade, but they’ve obviously accepted that we will need to have a chapter on this,” said Kiener, the EU negotiator.   However, New Delhi still takes issue with making the Trade and Sustainable Development chapter binding and enforceable through a dispute settlement mechanism. It has also threatened to retaliate against the EU’s carbon border tax, as POLITICO reported earlier this year. “The carbon border adjustment mechanism that the EU has visualized does not meet the test of fair play,” Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal said then.   If that wasn’t enough, a historical issue has also cropped up in the talks: An India-Pakistan dispute over the two countries’ rival claims to basmati rice. New Delhi is pressuring the EU to designate the grain Indian — but if Brussels does so, it risks a rift with Pakistan.  In short, sealing the agreement will likely entail a trade-off between the political benefits of a fast deal against the economic gains of a potentially more comprehensive agreement.   5. They are a temperature check of the EU’s trade priorities.   Ultimately, the deal will be a test of just how much of its (green) trade ambitions the EU is willing to sacrifice on the altar of geopolitics.   Considering Trump’s attempts to upend or at least significantly harm the rules-based trade order, calls have been growing for the EU to be more pragmatic and aim for quicker and less comprehensive deals.   But not everyone agrees that will ultimately be beneficial in the long-term.   “We hope that the result of the trade negotiations will be a commercially meaningful agreement,” Angelika Niebler of the European People’s Party, chair of the European Parliament’s delegation for relations with India, said in Parliament’s trade committee last week.   The India deal will also reveal just how important the bloc deems its aim to advance the bloc’s environmental agenda through trade deals.   “Clearly, India has [a] different geopolitical alignment, and they have always been somewhat closer to the Russia operation,” said García Bercero, the former EU negotiator who now works for the Bruegel think tank.   “But at the end of the day, I don’t think that this would need to be an obstacle to concluding an agreement.” 

BRUSSELS — Most thumbs were up. Some smiles were uneasy. And, in the middle of it all, the EU’s top trade official, Sabine Weyand, wore the kind of look that told the whole story: The bloc had gotten itself into a tricky spot. The photo, taken as the European Union and the United States sealed a fragile tariff truce at President Donald Trump’s Scottish golf resort on July 27, captured the discomfort on the European side over an agreement that was merely “the best it could get.” > President Trump's historic deal with the European Union reinforces our > strategic partnership with a key while expanding unprecedented market access > for American exporters. > > This colossal deal secures $750 billion in energy purchases and $600 billion > in investments, bolstering… pic.twitter.com/fcF2jdMP1f > > — United States Trade Representative (@USTradeRep) July 28, 2025 The two sides have finally firmed up Trump’s handshake deal with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen into a joint statement that sets a 15 percent baseline U.S. tariff; promises a reduction in tariffs on European cars; caps levies on pharmaceuticals and semiconductors; and fully exempts EU exports of aircraft. Throughout, Europe has been engaged in a delicate dance with Trump — seeking to hold him to his trade promises while its leaders lobby him to commit to security guarantees for Ukraine against Russian aggression. “We’re still hostage to American military and strategic protection with a horribly neuralgic point, which is Ukraine,” said Pascal Lamy, a former EU trade commissioner. “And if we laid into Trump, which we have the economic capacity to do, he would have been able to say: ‘Well, if Europeans are enemies, now I don’t see why I should continue to help Ukraine.’ Nobody wants to take responsibility for that.” A less pressing, yet more awkward, task will be for Brussels to show the world it didn’t break the very rules of international trade that it helped to craft. After all, it has lectured Beijing, Washington and New Delhi for years on the importance of the World Trade Organization as an umpire of rules-based commerce. “We have completely sat on the rules that we helped to create, together with the Americans, and we will be accused of continuing to undermine them in the future if things continue as they are,” said Lamy, who after his stint in Brussels went on to helm the Geneva-based WTO between 2005 and 2013.  Von der Leyen’s admission at Trump’s Turnberry golf club that the EU had a “surplus” with the United States that the deal would help “rebalance” was the last nudge the Trump administration needed to declare victory and bury a system it had long seen as obsolete.  “By using a mix of tariffs and deals for foreign market access and investment, the United States has laid the foundation for a new global trading order,” Trump’s top trade negotiator Jamieson Greer wrote in a newspaper op-ed days after the agreement.  “[T]he Turnberry system is by no means complete, but its construction is well underway,” he added. CREDIBILITY CRUNCH The transatlantic trade accord, say leading trade authorities, risks undermining the very principles that Brussels has long championed at the WTO in a world increasingly shaped by no-holds-barred geopolitical confrontation. “It is going to be very difficult for the EU to say, ‘We are defending the multilateral trading system,’ because they are one of many members that decided to negotiate a bilateral deal with the United States,” said Marco Molina, a trade lawyer and a former senior diplomat who led talks on reforming the WTO’s dispute settlement body until 2024. The core problem of the deal is that it goes against the basic principles of the multilateral trading system: reciprocity and nondiscrimination.  Europe has been engaged in a delicate dance with Donald Trump — seeking to hold him to his trade promises while its leaders lobby him to commit to security guarantees for Ukraine against Russian aggression. | Pool Photo Annabelle Gordon via EPA For one, the two partners need to give each other roughly equivalent concessions — which the framework agreement currently hardly does. Nondiscrimination, set in the WTO’s most-favored nation rule, requires that any benefit granted to one trading partner needs to be immediately extended to all members — unless their agreement covers “substantially all trade.”  So while the EU has agreed to eliminate all tariffs on U.S. industrial goods and on cars, it has to do it under a full-blown trade accord. The Commission insists the agreement will eventually meet that bar.  Because most tariffs are set to be phased out over time, Brussels argues, the deal will ultimately respect the established rules of global trade. A senior Commission official told reporters on Thursday that the opening passage of the joint statement spelled out a “commitment for both sides to make an effort of progressive liberalization.”  They stressed it was “ongoing work that will also help us to meet the standards of the World Trade Organization rules around these issues.” On the record, the Commission’s commitment is unequivocal. “The European Union is and will remain a champion and supporter of WTO and rules-based trade — this will not change,” said Olof Gill, the Commission’s spokesperson for trade.  Yet even former Commission officials aren’t buying it. “The EU’s credibility as a linchpin of the WTO rules-based system would be seriously compromised if it decides to implement tariff reductions on a preferential basis,” said Ignacio García Bercero, who was the Commission’s point person for the transatlantic relationship and was responsible for its WTO policy until 2024.  This was met with enthusiasm from the leader of the bloc’s biggest economy, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. | Filip Singer/EPA “There is zero credibility behind the argument that the EU-U.S. ‘deal’ is a step toward a WTO compatible [free-trade agreement],” added García Bercero, who is now a nonresident fellow at Brussels think tank Bruegel.  OUTBULLYING THE BULLY So what do you do when the biggest kid on the playground stops playing by the rules? For the EU, the response is increasingly: You don’t stand alone — you build a gang.   At first, Brussels resisted the idea of coordinating with other countries hit by Trump’s tariffs, such as Canada or Mexico. But it eventually changed course. “The main criticism that can be made against the Commission is that it did not seriously try to build an international anti-Trump coalition,” former WTO chief Lamy said.  That’s something that Brussels tried to fix in late June, when at a leaders’ summit, von der Leyen floated the idea of a new club in which the EU’s 27 countries would join forces with the members of the Pacific-focused Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, or CPTPP, bloc, which counts the U.K., Canada, Japan, Mexico and Australia among its members. This was met with enthusiasm from the leader of the bloc’s biggest economy, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. “If the WTO is as dysfunctional as it has been for years and apparently remains so, then we, who continue to consider free trade important, must come up with something else,” he told reporters.  Talks between EU and CPTPP negotiators are now expected later this year, with the goal of coordinating efforts to defend rules-based trade in the face of Trump’s tariff offensive, a top New Zealand finance official told POLITICO.  “The only way the EU can rebuild trust in the system is by coordinating with other members, beyond the U.S., to ensure WTO rules are respected,” said Molina, who now heads up his own law firm, Molina & Associates. “That will require leadership and teamwork — and the hope that Washington eventually realizes this trade war hurts American interests and consumers.”