One of President Trump’s earliest moves was to take the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which effectively collapsed the effort to construct a trade agreement between maybe ten countries. This is the sort of thing that I look at as background noise when it comes to politics on the ground, because while these sorts of things have tangible impacts, they’ll be subtle, and if they don’t go through, often the folks on the ground aren’t going to notice – who are different from, say, farmers who might be more strongly affected.
So I appreciated Steve Benen’s piece on Maddowblog on what’s happened since Trump pulled out:
… as Reuters reported this week, our former TPP partners have decided to simply go around us.
Eleven countries aiming to forge an Asia-Pacific trade pact after the United States pulled out of an earlier version will sign an agreement in Chile in March, Japan’s economy minister said on Tuesday, in a big win for Tokyo. […]
An agreement is a win for Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government, which has been lobbying hard to save the pact, originally called the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
Remember, that partnership was originally the United States’ idea. Now it’s “a big win” for Japan – which came on the heels of another big trade deal between Japan and the European Union, announced last year.
A Washington Post report in the fall noted that when Trump withdrew, it “created a vacuum other nations are now moving to fill, with or without the president.”
A FiveThirtyEight piece, noting that the Republican’s plans “backfired,” explained, “Japan, the world’s third-biggest economy, has assumed the leadership role. Canada, initially a reluctant member of the club, volunteered to host one of the first post-Trump meetings of the remaining TPP countries to work on a way forward – perhaps because research shows that Canadians will do better if they have preferential access that their American cousins lack. Smaller, poorer countries such as Vietnam and Malaysia wanted freer trade with the U.S. but agreed to consider improved access to countries such as Australia, Canada and Japan as a consolation prize for years of hard bargaining.”
It was clearly a trade agreement of some importance, and I suspect a lot of people will benefit from it – none of them Americans. But without analysis of the sort supplied by Steve, FiveThirtyEight, and others, how would we realize the mistake we appear to have made?
Of course, Japan and Canada are close allies of ours, so it’s not as if China or Russia had assumed the leadership position – and reaped the benefits of being out in front. But it’s clear that we’re retreating rapidly. And what are those benefits? Technologically, being out front often means developing new technologies that have often unpredictable positive – and sometimes negative – attributes. Financially, there are often advantages to being out front.
And prestige, while intangible, is not something to value lightly. This is not simple vanity, but is part of the unstated but always present struggle between governmental systems. The failure of our liberal democracy, under the dubious leadership of President Trump, to bring TPP to fruition speaks to a weakness in our governmental system of serious concern. It speaks to the vulnerability to spiteful whim to which President Trump appears painfully prone.
I can only hope we don’t bleed too much while we figure out how to patch it up.
P.S. now Trump wants back in.
