Recently the W.T.O. has facilitated a circular firing squad over climate-change efforts. The European Union and Japan challenged Canadian incentives on renewable energy. The United States won a case against a solar-power program in India. Then India attacked renewable energy programs in several American states. Then China filed a case in 2018 against additional American renewable energy measures.

But the W.T.O.’s overreach could prove to be its undoing. Its ability to decide such cases will effectively end on Dec. 11, when its appellate review board will no longer have a quorum.

After a series of W.T.O. decisions in which tribunals cooked up new standards — never agreed to by member nations — related to anti-dumping and subsidy issues, the Obama administration initiated a protest. Last year, the Trump administration doubled down, blocking the appointment of new appellate adjudicators.

The Seattle protesters who raised concerns about giving too much power to the W.T.O. were dismissed as anti-trade. But it was W.T.O. proponents, those who branded the organization and similar deals as “trade agreements,” who have given trade a bad name.

Since the W.T.O.’s formation in 1995, its proponents have oversold it with grandiose promises of dazzling economic gains. President Bill Clinton said the organization would deliver the average American family $1,700 a year of additional income. It would facilitate open market access that would, in turn, reduce our trade deficit, create new high-paying jobs and bring new riches to farm country.

But the organization’s rules were not designed for those outcomes, which never materialized.

Instead, trade negotiations have been dominated by corporate interests, while labor, consumer, and environmental groups are largely shut out. It’s no shock, then, that the W.T.O. has no labor or environmental requirements to raise wages or limit pollution, or that it sets ceilings but no floors on consumer safety standards. Nor are there rules disciplining monopolistic mega-corporations that now distort global markets or combating currency manipulations that create unfair trade advantages.

No doubt some American workers are bitterly angry and moved by Donald Trump’s trade rhetoric after having repeatedly been promised great gains from “trade” agreements. During the W.T.O. era, developed countries have lost millions of high-paying manufacturing jobs, especially after China joined in 2001. Income inequality between rich and poor countries, and within countries, has increased greatly.