Does Robert Samuelson really mean to say that the United States should sacrifice the economic interests of its citizens to the security wishes of Japan and South Korea? That’s certainly what it sounds like to me:
We seek to reassure nations that we’re still a Pacific power and that our proposal represents a useful framework to govern the region’s trade. A collapse would leave a vacuum that China would most likely fill. Through its own trade agreements, China might fashion a system that gives its exports preferential access to foreign markets, while securing guaranteed supplies of raw materials (oil, grains, minerals). That’s not in our interests.
The hard truth is that given the depth and breadth of Japan’s, South Korea’s, and Taiwan’s business arrangements with China no trade agreement with any of those countries that does not also bind China can possibly be effective. Such trade agreements won’t manage China’s rise so much as facilitate it.
The biggest thing that’s wrong with the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement is that it’s being conducted behind closed doors. Mr. Samuelson cannot possibly know whether it will include meaningful reductions in Japan’s agricultural tariffs and subsidies or protections for U. S. intellectual property. He just hopes it will.
Meanwhile, intellectual property protection is only really important for those who own patents or copyrights rather than to the American people more generally. Why not include something really important to our trade imbalance which means to all of us: the ridiculous exchange rates maintained by most of the countries in the negotiations in flagrant disregard of IMF standards?
Notice the authoritarian thinking nearlg ubiquitous among our media elites: “This trade agreement is good because powerful people say it is. We don’t know what’s actually in it but we’ve been told what to say and will parrot uncritically. Anyone who objects is a loser.”