In the winter of 2006, we published an article in the Chicago Journal of International Law with the title “Statecraft, Trade and the Order of States.” In that short piece, we developed an outline of the argument of this book. During the nearly two years that elapsed since completion of that article, we worked on a book-length version of the argument. As we were completing the manuscript during the spring of 2007, The Atlantic Council of the United States published a Policy Paper with the title “Transatlantic Leadership for a New Global Economy.” We were pleasantly surprised to find that the authors of this paper – important personages from the academic, business, and political worlds – validated virtually every aspect of the analysis we had advanced in our article published more than a year earlier. While agreeing with our claims regarding the current state of the institutions of global trade, the solutions advanced by this august body were rather different from our own.

This book is the story of the rise and fall of the institutions of the modern global trading order (the “Bretton Woods Order”). We share the view that the current crisis in the institutions of world trade poses great dangers for global order and must be addressed with deliberate speed. We come to the table with ideas and concrete proposals.