Misadventures of the Most Favoured Nations: Clashing Egos, Inflated Ambitions and the Great Shambles of the World Trade System
By Paul Blustein
Public Affairs £16.99, 346 pages

After writing two books that recount dramatic events in the life of the International Monetary Fund – the Asian and Argentine financial crises – Paul Blustein has now turned his attention to the World Trade Organisation. He has become, as he self-deprecatingly suggests, “the world’s foremost author of behind-the-scenes accounts about vaguely sinister international economic institutions with three initials”.

If there is any dramatic tension to be found in that niche, Blustein will find it. In this account of the Doha round of global trade talks, launched in 2001 and still far from complete, he produces his customary combination of forensic narrative and incisive character sketches of the main players. As someone who has spent nearly five years reporting the repeated setbacks and disappointments of the Doha round, I can sadly confirm that the picture he paints is wearyingly accurate.

Through no fault of his, it is hard to generate as much of a narrative arc out of Doha as from the Asian and Argentine episodes, since the round’s default mode is to lurch from one stalemate to another. If the subject matter of his previous two books might have provided material for a Dan Brown novel, the WTO talks tend towards the Samuel Beckett school of iterative stasis: “Let’s go.” “We can’t”. “Why not?” “We’re waiting for Doha”.

The book wrings as much suspense out of events as possible: the WTO’s disastrous 1999 meeting in Seattle, with the chaos of teargas and protesters on the streets matched by the fractious discord inside the talks; the launch of the Doha round itself in the Qatari capital in 2001, largely as a gesture of global solidarity in the aftermath of 9/11; the failed conference in Cancún in 2003, when the developing countries flexed their muscles, and a succession of generally unproductive meetings since.

Along the way, we meet a surprisingly colourful cast of characters: the mercurial Indian former trade minister Kamal Nath; his Brazilian counterpart Celso Amorim; the hard-driving former US trade representative Robert Zoellick; the EU counterpart with whom Zoellick got on, French technocrat Pascal Lamy, and the one with whom he did not, the calculating, media-conscious Peter Mandelson.

Several themes emerge that will not be surprising to trade wonks but need to be understood more widely, particularly in these days of worries about protectionism. One is that the WTO is a terrible body for conducting negotiations. Its 153 member states need to reach consensus on all decisions, as each country in theory possesses a veto: a structure Lamy (now head of the WTO) once called “medieval” – later amended to “neolithic”.

Another worry is that the Doha round was always going to struggle, since it was launched more for political than economic reasons. Once detailed negotiations began, farmers in both rich and poor countries fiercely opposed having their support removed. Blustein also shows how the improbable claims for Doha’s ability to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty were progressively downgraded.

His conclusions are sensible without being startling: pass a stripped-down version of Doha and declare a moratorium on the bilateral and regional trade deals that complicate the world trading system. The future could consist of “coalitions of the willing”, making smaller deals rather than requiring every country to sign up to every agreement.

It all sounds sage and constructive, but such qualities have been in short supply in the trade world. At the current rate of progress, Blustein could write his next book on the Doha round’s second decade of stasis. That saga would test even his formidable skills at creating adventure stories out of bureaucratic discord.

Alan Beattie is the FT’s world trade editor and author of ‘False Economy’ (Penguin)