Obama was quietly working on the TPP. It or something like it would probably have been the better strategy to check Chinese power and put us on a path to decouple from them, while boosting friendly allies in their orbit.
Trump pulled out of the deal and decided to do a trade war instead.
Obama spent a lot of political and reputational capital on the TPP. The only purpose of TPP was to counteract China. I think it would be very surprising if they were treating China as an ally.
Obama's TPP was a much better counter to China than anything the Trump administration accomplished. Too bad your "tarred and feathered," President didn't have the vision to take effective steps, and instead took loud, boisterous, and largely ineffective measures instead.
It's funny because there was a policy that would been both restrictive on China, and made sense economically: the TPP. Unfortunately, populism took hold in the US, and globalism (and with it, the TPP) became the scapegoat.
The problem with the TPP was that it stomped on consumer rights in a very China-like way. It was also very NAFTA-y in that it supported business and US natsec interests thoroughly while completely avoiding accountability to the average American (and to many of the citizens of other countries that it ostensibly would have helped).
The challenge with China has been and will remain avoiding moral hazards when navigating our relationship to them. Temptation comes from all sides in this regard.
Obama's response to contain China was the TPP. It could have been more (or less--no way to know) effective than Trump's, Obama just didn't tweet about it.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership TPP was a big attempt by the US political establishment to economically isolate China with most of Asia. Unfortunately, because it was also designed to bypass the US voter, it was not very popular.
Blocking TPP was a disaster. TPP would have achieved everything the Trump administration has failed to achieve with China and has spent tens of billions of dollars doing so in direct costs (the indirect costs are even higher and will last for decades).
The major complaint about TPP was the IP protections. But the hypocrisy is that the lack of the IP protections is exactly the same people complain about China.
There was absolutely no reason to block TPP, which in a nutshell, gave Chinese neighbors the opportunity to do business that the US was doing in China currently, and in return agree to implement an IP protection environment that everyone agrees China should have but doesn’t.
Besides providing American (and non American) companies with multiple alternatives to China where their IP would not be stolen, it would have built massive American soft power with Chinese neighbors at absolutely no cost to Americans, since the business going to those countries was business being done in China anyways.
Again, I'm not sure how TPP was actually supposed to accomplish what you're saying. As far as I know, TPP didn't restrict participants from trading with China, and it's not clear to me what would have economically discouraged them from doing so. Maybe I'm wrong - I genuinely want to know.
TPP was a brutally anti-Chinese trade agreement - it forged privileged trading status with all of China's main rivals and China would only be allowed to join later if they shaped up.
The US opted to drop it and unsuccessfully deal with the Chinese party 1:1 in negotiations. Imagine if a business partner was robbing you, and instead of finding other partners, you tried to negotiate with them. Obviously, they hold all the cards and have no incentive to play along. If anything, they would want to steal more! They would get more leverage!
I don't know if the TPP would have been a silver bullet, but it's hard to imagine the CCP would be this brazen if they were on the outside looking to come in. Remember that actions in Hong Kong and Xi Jinping's lifetime appointment all happened after the TPP was killed. I think they are power grabbing as much as they can now while no one is really holding them to task.
The much maligned TPP was aimed right at China. It was big business friendly, but it also encouraged the other large economies in the Pacific to align themselves with the US instead of China.
Remember when the US government successfully formed a partenrship agreement with 13 countries called the TPP that would have been a strong counter to China's growing influence but Trump threw it in the trash as soon as he got into office. Making us weaker just for political purposes.
The best analysis I saw of the TPP pointed out how ironic it is that Democrats with elections coming up are against it, but Obama is for it.
The reason? Because if we don't implement TPP, the Chinese will likely create their own trade policy with the countries in question and we'll be left out. Sometimes in diplomacy and global economics it's not a zero sum game, but a game of compromises.
I wonder if TPP would have fared better than tariff threats. That seemed to be the way Democrats we’re going to contain China, by forging trade alliances with SEA and chinas neighbors.
Trump had a lot of rhetoric over China but was weak on action.
Pulling out of TPP was a massive geo-political and economic win for China. And nothing was done about widespread IP theft, trade imbalances, data sovereignty concerns or the use of trade to influence other country's policies.
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