In the two years since US President Donald Trump abandoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Japan and the other TPP signatories have forged ahead with new trade deals. As a result, US exporters are increasingly feeling the pinch – and probably wondering what happened to "the art of the deal."
WASHINGTON, DC – Not content with its trade war against China, US President Donald Trump’s administration has also opened bilateral trade negotiations with Japan. Yet whatever Trump hopes to achieve with Japan, it will be far less than what he threw away when he abandoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in early 2017.
During the 2016 US presidential campaign, Trump promised Americans that he would negotiate so many great deals on their behalf that they would get “tired of winning.” Now that he has imposed heavy costs on US farmers, consumers, and the overall economy through tariffs on Chinese imports, Americans are probably growing quite tired indeed.
Trump’s withdrawal from the TPP is the canonical example of his trade-policy recklessness. Signed in 2016 by the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim countries, the treaty would have governed around 40% of all trade covered by World Trade Organization rules. It was a “twenty-first-century agreement” that included not just tariff reductions, but also provisions to liberalize retail, communications, entertainment, and financial services. It would have strengthened labor and environmental standards, established a new dispute-resolution mechanism, and created a framework for managing e-commerce, cyber security, intellectual-property rights, data mobility, and more.
WASHINGTON, DC – Not content with its trade war against China, US President Donald Trump’s administration has also opened bilateral trade negotiations with Japan. Yet whatever Trump hopes to achieve with Japan, it will be far less than what he threw away when he abandoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in early 2017.
During the 2016 US presidential campaign, Trump promised Americans that he would negotiate so many great deals on their behalf that they would get “tired of winning.” Now that he has imposed heavy costs on US farmers, consumers, and the overall economy through tariffs on Chinese imports, Americans are probably growing quite tired indeed.
Trump’s withdrawal from the TPP is the canonical example of his trade-policy recklessness. Signed in 2016 by the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim countries, the treaty would have governed around 40% of all trade covered by World Trade Organization rules. It was a “twenty-first-century agreement” that included not just tariff reductions, but also provisions to liberalize retail, communications, entertainment, and financial services. It would have strengthened labor and environmental standards, established a new dispute-resolution mechanism, and created a framework for managing e-commerce, cyber security, intellectual-property rights, data mobility, and more.