President Bush had little choice on Thursday when he reversed himself and lifted the tariffs on imported steel that he imposed last year.

For the first time in his nearly three years in office, the president, who has often reveled in the exercise of American power, finally met an international organization that had figured out how to hit back at the administration where it would hurt. Employing relatively untested powers, the eight-year-old World Trade Organization authorized European and Asian nations to devise retaliatory tariffs against the United States, just 11 months before a presidential election. Not surprisingly, the Europeans pulled out an electoral map and proudly announced they would single out products made in the states Mr. Bush most needs to win a second term.

In fact, what the W.T.O. accomplished when it forced the Bush White House into a rare 180-degree turn was exactly what its American champions envisioned and its opponents warned about during the first big globalization debates of the 1990's. Acting as the final arbiter of the world's trade rules, it reversed the politics of protectionism, making sure that nations that protect their markets — in the name of saving jobs — are forced to pay a steep price.

Mr. Bush's trade representative, Robert B. Zoellick, argued on Thursday that the president had reached an "independent decision" to lift the tariffs, and he acted as if the W.T.O.'s ruling that the tariffs are illegal was only a minor consideration in Mr. Bush's deliberations.

But the raw political fact remains that the W.T.O. made the price of protecting the steel industry simply too high. It was left to the Europeans to design the penalties, and they pinpointed textile mills in the Carolinas and farmers in the Midwest and California with a precision that Karl Rove, the president's political adviser, must have grudgingly admired.

"Defiance had real costs," one of Mr. Bush's senior aides said. "It was going to cost us exports and export jobs. It was going to cost us credibility around the world. It was going to put us at odds with Europe again."

There was another potential cost: The United States wins many more cases than it loses at the W.T.O., and to ignore the steel ruling would be to invite Japan, China and Europe to ignore rulings in Washington's favor.

So while the White House was loath to say so, Mr. Bush's decision to comply fully with the ruling helped establish the trade organization's authority, showing that even the world's largest economic power, and the nation that spurred its creation, had to bend to its rulings.

For the organization that conservatives, and some liberals, once denounced as an "unelected bureaucracy" that should never be given power over American jobs, this case was the rough equivalent of Marbury v. Madison, the 1803 decision that established the Supreme Court as the final arbiter of the constitution, able to force Congress and the executive branch to comply with its rulings.

"It may be remembered as a critical case," said Martin N. Baily, a scholar at the Institute for International Economics in Washington and the chairman of the council of economic advisers when the steel industry was beginning to appeal for White House aid in the late 1990's. "They changed the political equation in the U.S. and made the calculation for lifting the tariffs look good."

Mr. Bush, Mr. Baily said, must have swallowed hard.

"It wouldn't fit the Crawford image to be seen kowtowing to these Europeans," he said. "But as they sat down and debated the issue among themselves, the W.T.O.'s ability to impose sanctions and aim them at particular Congressional districts had to be a very major factor."

Having seen the brutal politics of steel up close, Mr. Baily wonders now whether Al Gore would have won West Virginia and thus the presidency three years ago if the Clinton administration had acted more vigorously to protect the American steel producers. "We resisted the pressure on economic grounds, and it's possible that Al Gore paid for that," he said.

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