ICC unplugged: John Denton on tariffs, WTO breakdown, Ukraine and ESG-washing - Trade Treasury Payments

If the rules that govern global commerce are allowed to wear thin, the immediate costs will be felt in higher frictions and weaker confidence, and the longer-term costs will fall heaviest on developing economies. If, instead, those rules are updated for the digital economy and if business is brought into the room where decisions are made, private capital can move at the scale required for conflict recovery and climate adaptation.

At the International Chamber of Commerce’s headquarters, Trade Treasury Payments (TTP) sat down with John Denton to discuss the health of the World Trade Organization, the ICC’s future role in multilateral decision-making, export finance for Ukraine’s rebuild, and the plumbing that holds climate finance back.

Guarding the multilateral trading system

The rules-based global trading system, underpinned for the past 80 years by the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its predecessors, has not collapsed, but it is being eroded by political choices that inject uncertainty at the border and into boardrooms. 

“There is a real cost to the erosion of the multilateral trading system,” Denton said, “and there is a real cost to the dissolution of the multilateral trading system.” The cost he has in mind is showing up as delayed orders, risk premia, and cautious investment decisions that are leaving development opportunities on the table.

The current saga of tariffs can help to illustrate this point. The measures enacted in the United States over the past six months were introduced, in part, for domestic reasons, including revenue generation and a push to return to manufacturing. While a tit-for-tat contagion of escalation could have taken hold, it didn’t because others largely chose not to retaliate. The European Union suspended its counter-measures. Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and ASEAN economies did the same. 

Denton added a reminder about scale when he said, “The US on its own cannot deliver or create a global trade war. It only accounts for 13% of global trade.” Most goods still move under the most-favoured-nation principle. His estimate was “something like 80%” of traded goods.

The structural problem sits in the rulebook. The WTO’s core texts were written before the commercial internet and before payment systems were attached to it. The absence of provisions on cross-border data flows is why a temporary moratorium has been used to avoid tariffs on those flows. Updating the rules has proved slow because change requires unanimity. Denton said, “The problem, of course, then is the operationalisation of the WTO, that to change that, to bring the rule book up to speed to reflect one of the most dramatic changes to the global economy… you actually have to have unanimity.” His answer is to let willing members move first through binding plurilateral agreements, with others joining when ready. That is not a retreat from multilateralism, but a way to keep the system relevant when consensus is blocked by hostage-taking across files.

The ICC’s part is to keep attention on the system rather than on any single bilateral dispute. The organisation’s analysis, including work presented around MC13, is meant to show governments that erosion carries a price that is paid by their exporters and consumers. Rather than being between the WTO and a better alternative, the real choice is between an updated, functioning rules-based order and a patchwork that raises costs and strands opportunity.

Putting business at the centre of multilateralism

The second thread in the interview concerns who sits at the table when rules are made. The problems that keep many policymakers up at night cannot be solved without support from the private sector. Energy transition, digital governance, and resilient supply chains all depend on business to finance and implement solutions, yet too often negotiations proceed with business watching from the gallery. The ICC has rebuilt its claim to bring an inclusive private-sector view into those rooms. Denton said, “We are a not-for-profit, for-purpose institution. We’re in 170 countries, 70% are in the global south. We’re the most inclusive business voice. We do not represent special interests. We are not lobbyists.”

To understand the impact that this can have when it comes to actual on-the-ground outcomes, we can turn to the case of Ukraine. Under the OECD framework, Ukraine sits in the highest sovereign risk category. That rating drives up the cost of export credit and holds private capital back even where projects look bankable. Denton said, “We’re not asking for exceptions. We just want to be certain that the assumptions on which the application of that rating is applied are actually legitimate and contemporary, so that’s something we need to work on.” 

None of this is unique to Ukraine. The same approach can be applied in other markets where conflict risk or institutional fragility has choked off trade and investment.

Turning pledges into capital for climate and adaptation

At COP29 in Baku, governments set a collective climate finance goal of $1.3 trillion by 2030 with increases each year. Whether that money reaches real projects will be decided by the rules that credit committees use every day.

Denton focuses on two mechanics that determine if a deal clears the hurdle. The first is how bank capital rules weight guarantees from multilateral development banks and insurers. The second is how sovereign ceilings cap otherwise strong corporates in emerging markets. 

Under today’s framework, viable transactions often fail even when a public guarantee stands behind the risk. He said, “We’ve actually done the technical work on this, and what we’ve found is if we can actually align it a lot better, we can increase the multiplier of the capital available four times.” Rather than relaxing standards, the point here is to recognise how guarantees work in practice so that balance sheets can support more lending at the same level of safety.

Adaptation finance, which covers concrete investments such as flood defences, climate-resilient agriculture and core infrastructure, shows the gap most clearly since private capital supplies only a small share of these investments. Denton links that shortfall to the rules that drive lending behaviour and to a lack of clear definitions. 

He said, “There’s been limited private sector engagement and adaptation because there’s been limited policy focus by regulators and by policymakers on adaptation, which means the taxonomies are not settled.” The ICC wants these technical fixes on the table ahead of COP30 in Belém. The aim is to update evidence-based risk weights, recognise robust guarantees, and assess strong corporates on their merits. Do that, and public guarantees can do the job they were designed to do while private finance moves at the scale required.

The future of the ICC

The ICC is best known for the commercial rules that have underpinned trade for a century, including Incoterms (first introduced in 1936) and the Uniform Customs and Practice for Documentary Credits (1933). Denton’s question is how to carry those values into a world where geopolitics, climate policy, and data now shape trade as much as customs schedules. 

He argues that the ICC’s leverage comes from institutional values that bind a global network. “We still have ICC Syria sitting at the table with ICC Israel,” he said. “We have ICC US sitting at the table with ICC Canada, because we are actually unified as an institution around very important values.” 

In a period when many formal processes are gridlocked, the ICC’s ability to convene adversaries under shared rules is why it feels able to argue for plurilateral steps, such as those that modernise WTO rules or take Basel-related adjustments onto ministerial agendas.  Trade has always adapted its instruments to the world it serves. Denton does not claim that risk has disappeared. He argues that risks are better managed inside institutions that work. 

That is the through-line of the conversation in Paris. Keep the system, make it contemporary and use it to deliver peace, prosperity and opportunity through rules people trust and institutions that can act.