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At the World Trade Organization’s (WTO’s) 14th ministerial conference in Yaoundé, two very different stories unfolded. One was about defiance. The other, about capitulation. As India appeared to bend under the weight of a proposed bilateral trade understanding with Washington, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s Brazil demonstrated what resistance actually looks like. In the final, chaotic hours of a meeting that dragged into the early morning of March 30, Brazil – backed by Türkiye – refused to accept the United States’ demand for a long extension on the moratorium on customs duties for electronic transmissions. It was a line in the sand.

The Yaoundé meeting, grandly described by the WTO leadership as a “turning point,” ended instead as a damp squib. It collapsed under the familiar contradictions of a system that increasingly substitutes genuine multilateralism with backroom bilateralism and selective plurilateral deals. That model has now, at least temporarily, hit a wall.

There is precedent for such failure. The WTO has stumbled before – at Seattle in 1999, Cancun in 2003, Buenos Aires in 2017, and Abu Dhabi in 2024. Each time, the ritual is the same: breakdown, followed by procedural statements about “the way forward” in Geneva. Yaoundé adds another chapter to that pattern of managed dysfunction.

But this time, one clash stood out: Brazil versus the United States.

Washington arrived with a clear agenda – to lock in a long-term, if not permanent, moratorium on e-commerce duties. This policy, first pushed through in 1998 with the active involvement of Bill Clinton, has since cost developing countries tens of billions in lost revenue annually. Its real beneficiaries are not small traders or emerging........

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