Acute water stress around the world has galvanized efforts to find new approaches and innovative solutions to access and maintain increasingly scarce water supplies. But critical questions about such trade, particularly with regard to the application of international trade law to untreated water, remain unresolved.
Why we pay so much attention to some tragedies, like this week’s earthquake in Turkey and Syria, and not others is bound up in questions of cause and effect. There is nothing political about an earthquake, we tell ourselves. There are no perpetrators, only victims. But politics always plays a role in the impact of a natural disaster.
Attempts to construct narratives of a golden age of U.S. support for free trade reflect anxieties that Washington’s current focus on subsidies and buy-American clauses could undermine the U.S.-led liberal international order. But this yearning for a golden age of free trade glosses over a much more complex reality.
