TRANSPACIFIC PARTNERSHIP Trump: US will only rejoin pact if terms improved
WASHINGTON/TOKYO:US President Donald Trump has instructed officials to take a look at rejoining an ambitious and sprawling trade pact with 11 other Pacific-rim nations that he had withdrawn the US from shortly after taking office in 2017.
He first told a group of Republican lawmakers and governors at a meeting at the White House that he was considering rejoining the pact, known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
But the White House dialled down talk of a major reversal that soon followed saying in a statement that the president has long maintained that he was open to a “substantially better deal”. And to that end, said a spokesperson, Lindsay Walters, “he has asked (officials)… to take another look at whether or not a better deal could be negotiated”.
The president followed up with a post on Twitter later in the night. “Would only join TPP if the deal were substantially better than the deal offered to Pres. Obama. We already have BILATERAL deals with six of the eleven nations in TPP, and are working to make a deal with the biggest of those nations, Japan, who has hit us hard on trade for years!”
President Trump had once called the pact as a “rape of our country” and had pulled the US out of it. He had also gone to withdraw the country from the Paris Climate Accord. In both instances he has indicated he was open to returning if offered a better deal.
After the US left the TPP, the remaining 11 nations—Japan, Canada, Australia, Chile, Brunei, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Mexico , Peru and Vietnam carried on with the negotiations and wrapped it up at a signing ceremony in Chile in March 2017. They froze portions of the deal pushed by the US, under then president Barack Obama.
The one major Pacific-rim nation missing from the agreement was China. And the trade pact was seen as a US attempt to counter Beijing’s growing economic and political clout in the region and the world.
The pact would be a powerful tool as Trump seeks to re-define trade ties with China. And it would also provide American manufacturers and farmers alternative markets if the US and China actually implemented the higher tariffs they have proposed on imports from each other.
Trump is under growing pressure from American farmers, for instance, of soybeans. China is their single biggest market and the 25% tariff proposed by China on all American imports in retaliation for American tariff proposals, could out price them out of the market relative to cheaper imports from rivals such as Brazil and Argentina.
But his Thursday announcement of a possible return to TPP took even his aides by surprise. Larry Kudlow, the president’s new chief economic adviser, told The New York Times, “This whole trade thing has exploded. There’s no deadline. We’ll pull a team together, but we haven’t even done—I mean, it just happened a couple hours ago.”