The Second Casualty

The editors of the Wall Street Journal point out that the second casualty of the Donald Trump’s election to the presidency appears to be the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement:

White House officials finally gave up on the Pacific free-trade deal on Friday, after weeks of insisting they had the votes to pass it. This failure was inevitable given the left-right protectionism of the 2016 campaign, but let’s hope it’s not the first thunder crash of a new era of trade war that a shaky world economy can ill afford.

Both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton ran against the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, and at least the President-elect’s opposition was sincere. The TPP has always lacked a majority in the House and maybe even the Senate, and votes weren’t lost merely because both candidates fanned sentiment against “globalism.” The details included too many non-trade provisions like labor and environmental rules that inspired defections by free traders.

I’m not sure it’s completely dead and, as has been said, there’s a great difference between mostly dead and completely dead.

I suspect there will be attempts to resuscitate it. It might help if a real campaign to persuade people of its merits would be mounted. What I’ve seen so far are airy paeans to the virtues of free trade in the abstract and a few estimates measured in the billions or tens of billions of the financial benefits that will accrue, mostly to a handful of big company CEOs.

Here are a few of the questions to which I’d like answers.

• We already have “free trade” agreements with nearly all of the parties of the TPP. What benefits would the United States reap from the multi-laterial TPP that wouldn’t be realized from a bilateral trade agreement with Japan?
• China is not a party to the TPP but does have “free trade” agreements with some of the countries that are. In the light of that how do we prevent China from reaping the benefits of the TPP without being bound by its restrictions?
• What are the specifics of the plans to assist workers who will lose their jobs as a consequence of the TPP?