President Trump has already withdrawn from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. Experts support bilateral agreements in relation to multilateral/regional agreements. Indeed, in bilateral agreements, it can make more concessions by asserting the power of the United States one by one against other countries. Three scenarios are therefore possible: even if Doha is stalled, WTO negotiations have continued through so-called plurilateral negotiations or agreements between subgroups of WTO members. Multilateral agreements are easier to negotiate because they are more concentrated and not all members are subject to their terms. Although the TBT agreement applies to a wide range of industrial and agricultural products, health and plant health measures and procurement specifications are subject to separate agreements. The rules of the OBT agreement help distinguish between legitimate standards and technical rules and protectionist measures. Standards, technical rules and compliance assessment procedures must be developed and applied on a non-discriminatory basis, developed and applied in a transparent manner and, where appropriate, based on relevant international standards and guidelines. Negotiations continued with low expectations after the 2008 global financial crisis. But the ministerial post in Bali, Indonesia, in 2013 achieved a major achievement: the first multilateral agreement since the creation of the WTO. This was the Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA), which aims to speed up customs procedures and make trade easier, faster and cheaper. The WTO estimated in 2015 [PDF] that this could increase world trade by about a trillion dollars.
Discussions also reached an interim agreement on « public storage » as developing countries could continue to store agricultural products to protect against food shortages. For example, during the Nairobi talks in 2015, 53 WTO members concluded an extension of the Information Technology Agreement (ITA), which reduces tariffs on a number of computer products. This agreement means that more than 97% of the world`s information technology trade is now covered by WTO rules. An important multilateral agreement is the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA), which has been under negotiation since 2013 among 23 members [PDF], including the United States and the European Union (EU), but without China. TiSA supporters hope to take advantage of the talks to support the liberalisation of trade in services by the WTO, the rules of which have not been updated since 1995. The following initiatives by European policy makers and the US government were: 1995, the creation of a business interest group, the Transatlantic Trade Dialogue (TABD) by authorities on both sides of the Atlantic; 1998, the creation of an advisory committee, the Transatlantic Economic Partnership; The Transatlantic Economic Council was established in 2007, bringing together business representatives from both sides of the Atlantic to advise the European Commission and the US government – and finally, in 2011, the creation of a high-level panel of experts whose conclusions, presented on 11 February 2013, recommended the opening of negotiations for a large-scale free trade agreement.