WTO chief's bid for second term sets up clash with Trump

World Trade Organization Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala will run for a second term unopposed, the organization said, raising questions about whether she’ll receive support from a new U.S. administration under President-elect Donald Trump.

The month-long period for nominations closed on Friday with the incumbent, a former Nigerian finance minister and the first woman to hold the job, emerging as “the only candidate for the role,” Ambassador Petter Ølberg of Norway, chair of the WTO’s General Council, said in a statement on Saturday.

Okonjo-Iweala, 70, is seeking a second four-year term running the Geneva-based trade body when her current term expires on Aug. 31. She took office in March 2021.

Her candidacy, announced months before the U.S. election this week, sets up a potential showdown with the incoming Trump administration. The WTO’s mission of fostering lower trade barriers is at odds with Trump’s threats of universal tariffs and its lurch toward protectionism.

In the previous presidential election year of 2020, the first Trump administration supported a different candidate — then-South Korean Trade Minister Yoo Myung-hee, to run the WTO, slowing the selection process. In early 2021, the White House of newly elected Joe Biden backed Okonjo-Iweala and she got the job.

The appointment process is done by consensus among the WTO’s 166 members, typically starting nine months before the expiration of the current leader’s term.

According to the timetable for the selection process, Okonjo-Iweala will have until Feb. 8 to lobby membership for support. The final two-month period, ending April 8, “will be devoted to a process of consultations to allow the General Council ultimately to arrive at its choice for appointment.”

U.S. Inauguration Day is Jan. 20.

According to the WTO’s procedures for appointing a director-general, there may be a route for her to secure a second term without Washington’s blessing — though it would mark a major break from the organization’s consensus-driven decisions.

Trump has threatened in the past to withdraw the U.S. from the WTO, , and the Trump and Biden administrations paralyzed the organization’s appellate body — its supreme arbiter for resolving trade disputes — by blocking all new appointments to the panel.

In his book “No Trade Is Free,” Trump trade adviser Robert Lighthizer calls Okonjo-Iweala “China’s ally in Geneva.”

If a candidate fails to gain countries’ support through consensus, “members should consider the possibility of recourse to a vote as a last resort,” the procedures state. Such a step “shall be understood to be an exceptional departure from the customary practice.”