President Donald Trump might be disrupting the status quo surrounding international trade but he's only one member of the World Trade Organization (WTO), according to the executive director of its joint agency, the International Trade Centre (ITC). "Donald Trump is the WTO. The WTO is 164 countries, the WTO is not anything else than the sum of a group of countries sitting around a table making a decision to exchange reciprocal concessions. The word 'reciprocal' is very important to these leaders — 'I give you, and you give me,' 'You may give me in cars and I give you in textiles.' It's reciprocal and you decide," ITC Executive Director Arancha Gonzalez told CNBC's "Squawk Box Europe." "But if the WTO doesn't work, it's because the leaders don't want it to work," she said. "But I think it's in their interest to make the WTO work because it's the most efficient way to fix today's interdependence." Gonzalez's comments to CNBC come after several weeks dominated by international concerns over a potential trade war between the world's biggest economies U.S. and China. Calling out what he sees as unfair trade practices and accusing China of "dumping" (the practice of flooding global markets with cheap products, such as steel, which lowers the product's prices), Trump unveiled in March a list of Chinese imports that he said he would target.

President Donald Trump answers a reporter's question as he departs to view Hurricane Irma response efforts in Florida, September 14, 2017. Jonathan Ernst | Reuters

Trade rules need to be fixed