Trade, Tariffs, and Today’s Global Order

Cut through the complexity of a global trade system shaping world markets—from supply chains to poverty reduction, domestic GDP and productivity, consumer prosperity, and national security—and the national policies that help it work. Meet Columbia Law Professor Petros C. Mavroidis.
PowerPoint for Tuesday's Discussion is Available Here!

Professor Petros C. Mavroidis
Columbia Law School

December 2, 2025 • 6:00–8:00 PM
Hosted by the Columbia Club of New York

REGISTER HERE

$35 + tax
ZOOM is Free.  REGISTER HERE FOR ZOOM.
Location
OCabanon New York
245 W 29th Street (between 7th & 8th Ave)
New York, NY 10001

Discussion & Q&A + Conversations Before & After
Wine & Cheese Included

Event Description
Join us for an engaging (and timely) conversation on tariffs, global trade, and the state of the international economic order with Professor Petros C. Mavroidis, one of the world’s leading experts on international trade law.

This is your chance to make sense of today’s global trading system—Professor Mavroidis will answer your questions on trade, tariffs, and the world economy, and offer a clear window into how the international rules that shape our daily lives fit together.

Whether you’re an attorney, global diplomat, policy thinker, business leader, economist, or historian, or an alum from any of Columbia’s schools, this event is open to all Columbia Club members. It’s also a great chance to meet fellow alumni ahead of our Holiday Party on December 18!

Introductions by Jacob Shapiro, Board Member, Columbia Club of New York.

⚽🎾⛳ Professor Mavroidis also brings deep experience in global sports arbitration and international dispute resolution across multiple arenas—so definitely bring your sports questions too!

Biography
Petros C. Mavroidis is the Edwin B. Parker Professor of Foreign & Comparative Law at Columbia Law School and one of the world’s leading authorities on international trade law and the WTO. His landmark work, The Regulation of International Trade, received the 2017 Certificate of Merit in International Law from the American Society of International Law.

His latest publication is Industrial Policy, National Security and the Perilous Plight of the WTO (Oxford, 2025).

At Columbia, he is a member of the Center on Global Governance and serves on the advisory boards of the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law and the Columbia Journal of European Law. He is also affiliated with the American Law Institute, the American Arbitration Association, and Bruegel as a Non-Resident Fellow.

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Preparing for the Discussion

The Columbia Club community brings together alumni from a wide range of industries and backgrounds — so if trade law isn’t your specialty, no worries at all! This event is even more for you and anyone with expertise or interest in cutting through the noise and decoding a global system of trade that is under strain.
Linked here is Tuesday's PowerPoint presentation prepared by Professor Petros C. Mavroidis.  Further, below is an updated list of themes and key trade terms prepared by the moderator in case you’d like to explore more ahead of the discussion.

Key Themes to Explore

Phases of Globalization & The Return of Geopolitics: Understanding the major waves of globalization — from 19th-century cost-cutting industrial integration, to the interwar Great Retreat, to the liberal international order of the Cold War, to the GVC/ICT revolution — and how after 2022, geopolitical rivalry and activist industrial policy have again become defining forces in trade.
Embedded Liberalism & GATT’s Institutional DNA: How early post-WWII leaders, particularly the United States and the United Kingdom, designed a trade system that deliberately preserved policy space for state intervention (New Deal-style industrial and social policy). Weak subsidy rules were not a bug, but a feature needed to sustain the order.
What GATT Proved — Tariffs Down, Forum Confidence Up: GATT completed 8 negotiation rounds, driving global tariffs from roughly 23% to about 3% over 1948-2025, delivering early agreements on non-tariff barriers (e.g., Tokyo Round), and establishing reliable enforcement with over 80% adoption of legal reports. Its success paved the way toward a larger rules-based system and eventually inspired unprecedented WTO membership expansion.
The China Shock, Automation & Distributional Justice in Trade: How optimism surrounding China’s WTO accession shifted to economic disruption narratives. Debate persists over manufacturing concentration, jobs lost, and the role of automation. The core decision to redistribute gains or cushion losses remains national. Transparency and domestic safety nets are central to legitimacy of open trade.
Institutional Crisis of Multilateralism vs. The Rise of Regionalism: How the WTO now faces twin crises — a non-functional Appellate Body and stalled rule-making — while FTAs deepen and multiply, driven by the EU and alliances like CPTPP. Whether new regional “fast lanes” complement or strain multilateralism remains contested, but participation in FTAs has become nearly universal even without formal WTO consistency testing.
Trade, Security & The Missing Economic Security Clause: How GATT historically managed (if not always resolved) national security disputes, but invocation of national security expanded sharply during the first Trump administration (notably in the steel sector). The WTO treaties lack an explicit “economic security” concept, raising questions about justiciability, institutional design, and the risks of miscalibration.
The Unfinished Future of the WTO — Variable Geometry & Rules Modernization: How for the WTO to persist as a viable forum, differentiated membership commitments (“variable geometry”) may be necessary, alongside updated rules on subsidies, state intervention, climate and environment, development status, and potential institutional redesign modeled on international adjudication frameworks (e.g., ICJ-type).

Glossary of Trade Terms

Bretton Woods: The 1944 post-WWII institutional architecture for global monetary stability. It originally proposed a formal global trade organization (ITO), but when the ITO failed, GATT became the interim, intentionally lightweight framework governing multilateral trade cooperation until 1995.
GATT (1947): A provisional multilateral trade agreement created under U.S.-U.K. leadership. It intentionally allowed space for state-backed industrial and social policy (embedded liberalism) and maintained weak disciplines on subsidies to sustain political support for open trade. Though “temporary,” it governed global trade for nearly five decades until the WTO was created.
WTO (1995) — World Trade Organization: The treaty-based institution that replaced GATT and formalized trade rules into binding agreements with structured dispute settlement. Unlike GATT, the WTO agreements did not explicitly recognize economic security. Since 2019, the Appellate Body has lacked quorum due to geopolitical deadlock, making formal appeals non-operational, while panels and interim arbitration pathways continue in practice when members opt into them.
MFN (Most-Favored-Nation Treatment): The core non-discrimination rule of the WTO and GATT: any trade advantage granted to one member must be extended to all. This principle has come under strain as states increasingly rely on selective partnerships, retaliation, and national security justifications.
Tariff: A tax on imported goods. Historically a primary focus of GATT rounds (major global tariff reductions). Today tariffs are also used strategically to apply negotiation pressure and respond to geopolitical rivalry.
Non-Tariff Barriers (NTBs): Policy measures other than tariffs (standards, quotas, regulations). First major multilateral NTB agreements emerged in the GATT Tokyo Round through variable-geometry participation, allowing subsets of members to adopt deeper commitments.
Industrial Policy: State support or protection for domestic industries using subsidies, funding, incentives, or import protection. While early trade frameworks aimed to limit such activism, since 2022 this has become a central arena of geopolitical competition, especially in advanced technology, manufacturing hubs, energy-transition sectors, and critical supply security.
National Security Exceptions: Legal carve-outs in trade law (e.g., GATT Article XXI) that were historically understood as rare emergency measures. Their use expanded significantly under the first Trump administration, notably for shielding the steel industry, raising an ongoing debate about whether national security exceptions should be adjudicated or remain political.
Global Value Chains (GVCs): Cross-border production networks made possible by declining transport and communication costs and, since 1990, by the ICT revolution. GVCs dramatically shifted global manufacturing geography, concentrating certain supply hubs (especially China), and amplifying discussion of interdependence as both leverage and vulnerability.
Strategic Dependence: Reliance on foreign suppliers, industrial hubs, or regions for critical goods or factors of production where disruption risks economic continuity or security interests.
Free Trade Agreements (FTAs): Regional or plurilateral trade pacts negotiated by smaller coalitions, pursued most actively by the EU and mega-regional alliances like CPTPP. FTAs are formally meant to satisfy WTO consistency tests; in practice, participation is nearly universal and disputes over third-country effects have already begun.
Dispute Settlement Paralysis: The post-2016 political deadlock over appointing WTO Appellate Body members, resulting in loss of quorum in 2019. This rendered formal appeals non-operational, shifting enforcement toward temporary arbitration solutions or non-appeal agreements by participating members.
MPIA: A voluntary coalition of WTO members that agree to resolve appeals through binding arbitration when disputes would otherwise be frozen by appealing into a non-functioning WTO Appellate system. It serves as a stop-gap enforcement “bridge,” not a treaty amendment.