The Trump administration has fired another volley at global the institutional order that the United States both created and sustained over the post-WWII period.

In the crosshairs is the WTO appellate body (AB), a council of seven individuals who act as a court of appeal for rulings handed down by the panel process. The AB was established alongside the WTO in 1995 (from the GATT); it hears cases referred by WTO members, and its judgements are considered final and irreversible.

Judges who sit on the AB are appointed on four-year terms, with the possibility of being reappointed once. Several judges’ terms will expire this week, bringing the council down to just one member – below the three-member threshold required to pass judgement.

US representatives are threatening to veto the appointment of new judges ahead of trade talks in Geneva this week. The United States stands alone in its willingness to hobble the WTO conflict resolution process, driven by longstanding concerns over how AB rulings can enable new interpretations of biding regulation, effectively casting it as a kind of supreme court of the global trade regime. More specifically, President Trump has fixated on how the process is supposedly weighed against US interests, declaring in a recent interview: “[the WTO benefits] everybody but us… we lose the lawsuits, almost all the lawsuits in the WTO.”

The move is no spur-of-the-moment decision. Quite the contrary, it is in keeping with the overall arc of Trump’s foreign policy, exemplified in the John Bolton editorial of March 2017, in which the erstwhile national security advisor lambasted the WTO dispute process as toothless and existing at the direct expense of US national sovereignty.

These WTO concerns even predate the rise of ‘America first’ politics. In 2016, the Obama administration set the stage for the current deadlock when it stood alone in blocking the reappointment of South Korea’s Seung Wha Chang, reducing the AB board to six members. At that time, US officials were accused of punishing Chang, who happened to have ruled against the United States in several disputes (stemming in large part from disparities in US domestic law and WTO regulations concerning anti-dumping measures). According to the Obama administration, Chang and others on the AB had exceeded the mandate of the institution to engage in the active creation of new trade regulations.