ply with all the demands of the US or give up the trade entirely. This is especially important since many smaller nations depend on foreign trade to survive. Furthermore, the WTO can fight interstate collusion, such as was needed concerning the oil trade in the 1970s. A vision of the world without the WTO can most closely be imagined when observing the world before GATT which the WTO was spawned out of. Two centuries of unilateral trade policy by the United States are characterized by such backward decrees such as the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act and the Smoot-Hawley tariffs. Even since the formation of the WTO, many past presidential candidates, who are luckily not in office, such as Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan have been against free trade policies and have advocated closing the economy. Many of the people in office are not far from the foolishness of those they beat. And the average policy makers of other countries are even less apt understanding economic ideology.The losses incurred by closing the economy are not also limited to within the nation, as demonstrated during the interwar period in the 1930s. There is a political interdependence between a nation and its trading partners, which is affected by trading policies. When the United States and the United Kingdom imposed trade barriers in the early 1930s in response to the economic recession that soon became the Great Depression, they made it harder for other countries to resist also going down that path, by either provoking retaliation, which Canada did to the United States, or setting an example that affects the political economy of tariffs in other countries.Another alternative to the WTO are regional agreements, such as EU, NAFTA, and ASEAN. However, as successful as these regional agreements are, they will never be able to accommodate the needs of nations on a global level, for they will always be restrained to their region. Thus regional agreements cannot compet...
