Trading blows Will Trump finish what the Seattle protesters started?

The sting of teargas was a price worth paying, said Michael Dolan as he looked back on the Battle of Seattle and how the World Trade Organization's attempt to break down the barriers to international trade was derailed by anti-globalisation protesters.

- Phillip Inman

The sting of teargas was a price worth paying, said Michael Dolan as he looked back on the Battle of Seattle and how the World Trade Organization's attempt to break down the barriers to international trade was derailed by anti-globalisation protesters. "The WTO has never recovered, it really hasn't," he said. Dolan was one of the organisers of the blockades and marches that brought the US city to a standstill in 1999 and plunged all attempts by WTO officials to construct a free trade agreement among more than 150 countries into disarray. Developing world farmers united with US industrial workers against the move, which they saw as a neoliberal initiative in support of multinational corporations and an attack on basic employment rights.

The WTO is under fire again, though this time from Donald Trump, whose return to the White House threatens to become an existential crisis for the global trade body. Trump rejects the post-war mission to reduce barriers to free trade, including cuts to import tariffs, and argues they have mostly benefited China to the detriment of US businesses and workers.

Illustrating how much he believes a surcharge on imports will help US businesses, about three weeks before he secured a second term in the White House Trump told an audience at the Economic Club of Chicago: "To me, the most beautiful word in the dictionary is 'tariff'. It's my favourite word."