This past weekend, a conference meant to jump-start the Doha Round of World Trade Organization negotiations collapsed. As Daniel Drezner points out with an entertaining link, the talks have been struggling — or stumbling, bumbling, fumbling — for months. And the conventional wisdom is that the end of July is a firm deadline for real progress: President Bush’s Trade Promotion Authority is set to expire next spring, and if the talks don’t get on track, no agreement could possibly be ready in time to submit under the fast-track terms. And, the story goes, without Congress’ commitment to take a straight up-or-down vote on a trade deal, America’s elected representatives inevitably will ruin its carefully balanced terms with amendments designed to favor particular industries. The old protectionist log roll that brought us the Smoot-Hawley disaster in 1930 will wreak havoc with 21st century globalization.

But I don’t believe this story. The challenge for the Doha Round of the WTO negotiations is to find an international agreement. The details of the ratification procedure in the United States are not the key question. Trade Promotion Authority is nothing more than a promise from Congress not to amend a trade agreement negotiated by the President. In return, the President promises to consult Congress during the negotiations — to keep representatives informed about the talks’ twists and turns and to listen to legislators’ concerns about priority negotiating goals. But even if the formal agreement expires, both the President and Congress have an interest in following its basic terms. The President has no interest in reaching an agreement with America’s international partners that he knows is unlikely to pass a ratification vote. And Congress has no interest in amending a deal that they know resulted from hard negotiations — the best deal that they can expect, considering the international constraints on the American negotiating team.

In fact, the United States has successfully negotiated and implemented many trade deals without formal fast-track Trade Promotion Authority (for a quick, useful guide, see this Brookings Institution policy brief). The concept as we know it today was not even “invented” until the 1974 Trade Act. Recently, the U.S.-Jordan Free Trade Agreement (among others) was implemented without Trade Promotion Authority — and without any attempts to amend the treaty during Congressional ratification.

The potential hitch is that individual legislators may not consider the interests of Congress as a whole. So an individual whose constituents are disproportionately employed in declining industries may seek to amend a trade deal, even if the amendment would go against the national interest. In fact, that legislator would be doing precisely what s/he was elected to do — representing the interests of his or her constituents.

So what holds back the unraveling? Leadership, and perhaps party discipline. One of the key reasons that political parties exist at all is to prevent the legislature from dissolving into a free-for-all of local, “special” interests. In the trade policy context, bipartisanship often means cooperation across party lines to protect declining industries: parties make no difference in the politics of “I’ll scratch your back, if you scratch mine.” Party leaders restrain those across-the-aisle deals.

Of course, party leaders may cooperate to ratify a trade deal. And then bipartisanship and party discipline would work together. It would take a lot for party leaders to reach across the aisle on trade next summer, although we can hope that some would try.

Meanwhile, what’s holding up the agreement now? It’s not the bogeyman of the expiration of fast-track negotiating authority. The problem is that the terms of a deal among the various nations of the world are not obvious. Trade negotiations today are a problem of international politics rather than domestic politics. The Americans want Europe to make big concessions; Europe wants concessions from the United States. And of course Japan, Brazil, India, and others have big dogs in the fight.

Sometimes a crisis atmosphere can make negotiators believe that they need to make a deal rather than delay and hope for better later. But sometimes the crisis atmosphere is counter-productive. It can breed fatalism. And we’re in the latter situation right now, with delegates leaving negotiating sessions early because they consider the talks hopeless, especially with the impending fast-track deadline.

It’s probably time to step back from the brink, let the false deadline lapse, and come at the negotiations again in a few months with clear heads.

Domestic politics are giving the parties a bad name these days: gay marriage and flag burning amendments are widely derided as bad public policy pursued only for partisan ends. Those fights should fade with the fall elections, and perhaps the parties can serve a more positive purpose next spring — on trade policy, for example.

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