It is not every day that a former chief trade negotiator for the U.S. and the titular leader of the U.S. foreign policy establishment urges the abandonment of a rule-based international trading system that has contributed enormously to unprecedented commercial peace and prosperity for America and the rest of the world.

I refer, of course, to the World Trade Organization. Michael Froman, former U.S. trade representative and current president of the Council on Foreign Relations, has called for U.S. withdrawal in Foreign Affairs. Cordell Hull must be turning over in his grave.

According to Froman, “The global trading system as we have known it is dead ... Even if pieces of the old order manage to survive, there is no going back. … Clinging to the old system and pining for its restoration would be deluded and futile.”

Pardon the pining, but should we really do this? The WTO is a global public good of great value, laboriously assembled on a bipartisan basis (at least in America) dating back to when Secretary of State Hull and President Franklin Roosevelt began lowering tariffs during the New Deal in the 1930s.

And what of the desires of 165 of the 166 member countries of the WTO? All of them want fervently to preserve and strengthen, not abandon, the rule-based multilateral trading system overseen by the embattled WTO, not abandon it. The one........

© The Hill