Last-ditch negotiations in Geneva to complete a wide-ranging trade agreement covering agriculture, manufacturing and intellectual property among the 153 member countries of the World Trade Organization fell apart July 29, dashing hopes for a deal before President Bush leaves office. Now the talks are likely to be put on hold as the United States prepares to elect a new president, who must figure out what he thinks about the many complex and contentious issues on the table.

For those in the trenches of the trade fight, the biggest worry now may be that neither John McCain nor Barack Obama will devote much attention to trying to understand what’s at stake, what went wrong, and what will be needed to bring the industrialized world and developing countries together to reach a comprehensive deal.

But perhaps the U.S. election presents an opportunity for new thinking about how to resolve the impasse.

This latest failure in the so-called Doha round of negotiations (and there have been several setbacks since they began in November 2001) left many opponents of globalization cheering and many supporters glum. Still, there seems to be little possibility that movement toward a more open trading environment will halt, much less reverse course. Too much capital and economic growth is riding on it.

Of course, the collapse in the talks doesn’t help the developing world address concerns that it is being left further behind. In particular, it doesn’t remove fears that industrial country farm subsidies suppress commodity prices and undermine efforts to increase local production at a time of rising food shortages. With existing rules left in place, current practices also will remain.

Nor does the impasse satisfy the developed world, which wants to open global markets even wider to the goods and services it offers.

The question is whether further liberalization comes under the auspices of multinational agreements intended to benefit all or through more limited country-to-country arrangements, such as those pursued by the Bush administration in recent years, that may offer fewer long-term advantages to either side.

The creation of the World Trade Organization 13 years ago culminated the last successful round of worldwide negotiations on issues of market-distorting behaviors and barriers to commerce. That action recognized that globalization was a fact of life and that it needed to be supervised and in some cases policed.

What’s happened since is that efforts to expand on that success have run up against cultural, intellectual, economic and political obstacles that are so far proving intractable. And, in part as a result, opposition to additional trade liberation in both developing countries and developed ones has become stronger.

Because the challenges facing trade negotiators today are quite difficult, it may be that a wholly different approach is necessary to rebuild what appears to be a fundamental lack of trust.

U.S. Trade Representative Susan C. Schwab complained bitterly last week that developing countries — read, India and China — had demanded an untenable escape clause in the agriculture talks. Negotiators were attempting to craft a “safeguard mechanism” that would allow a brake on surges of farm imports that threaten to overwhelm a developing country’s domestic agriculture base. But what India and others wanted, in Schwab’s view, would have allowed them to close markets altogether.

That sounds as if Schwab doesn’t count on those countries to act in good faith. (For what it’s worth, many in the developing world don’t trust the United States and Europe to play fair, either. They assume industrial countries will flout rules and ignore adverse WTO decisions, choosing to pay the punitive tariffs that result because they can afford to do so and refusing to alter their behavior.)

Professor Susan Ariel Aaronson at George Washington University is among those who advocate incentives to improve the enforcement of trade rules as well as other steps to make globalization serve everyone. In her view, closer adherence to the rule of law would make trade more transparent and less threatening.

Progress toward a more open trading system has been inexorable since World War II, driven in large part by the United States. And despite the complaints of some domestic foes of an increasingly globalized world, it’s easy to see that the United States derives a considerable amount of economic benefit from trade.

Gross exports account for a larger share of the U.S. economy than does all business investment. And net exports, what’s left after subtracting the effects of imports from the value of sales overseas, were the biggest reason the U.S. economy didn’t actually contract in the second quarter of this year.

What to do next about the Doha round will be an important consideration for the next president and the next Congress. As the world’s largest market for imported goods, the third-largest exporter and the biggest provider of commercial services, the United States has more at stake in these talks than any other country. It needs to find a way to make them work.

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