Free trade or bully’s charter?

Prime Minister Bill English was right to rebuff Donald Trump’s absurd notion of a trade agreement with a 30-day termination clause. Unfortunately the spat shows how difficult it is going to be dealing with an American president who doesn’t live in the real world.

Trump canned the proposed 12-nation TransPacific Partnership trade deal and said he would replace it with bilateral deals. ‘‘If someone misbehaves,’’ Trump said, they would be given 30 days ‘‘to straighten it out or we’re gone’’.

No such deal could possibly work because it would be so blatantly one-sided. The dominant partner, the United States, could unilaterally decide to quit after decreeing both that the other side was ‘‘misbehaving’’ and that it had failed to mend its ways.

This would not be a free trade deal. It would be a bully’s charter.

English says the out-clause would be ‘‘unattractive’’. In fact it would be a deal-breaker. The question is whether Trump meant it seriously and whether the United States would ever try to make it happen.

In the real world of diplomatic give-and-take and of a careful balancing of economic interests, such a deal is impossible. That doesn’t mean, however, that Trump thinks it’s impossible. Like so many other of Trump’s statements, the world waits to see if he was joking or not.

In the meantime, there is nothing to stop New Zealand trying to stitch together a TPP without the United States. Greater access to the huge and protected Japanese market for our agricultural exports would certainly be worth having. Whether New Zealand could get meaningful access is an open question, and the Green Party is wrong to say that New Zealand shouldn’t even try.

At the same time, the glaring faults of the proposed TPP are obvious. This was not a free trade deal; it was a limited opening-up of access that moved extremely slowly on agriculture, where New Zealand’s interests collide with the protectionist policies of the US and Japan.

And many of the central parts of the deal have nothing to do with freer trade and everything to do with powerful commercial interests. The proposed massive extension of copyright protections was there to protect Hollywood, not to further the cause of free trade. The whole matter of ‘‘business-friendly’’ tribunals to decide trade disputes is not a vital part of freer trade but seems designed to protect the interest of large multinationals.

Where does all this leave New Zealand? In a difficult place, with few prospects. The United States has very few reasons to do a deal with New Zealand. It already has easy access to the New Zealand market, so we have little bargaining power. But in any case the market is tiny in global terms, so why would Trump’s America be in a hurry to sign a trade pact with it?

For Japan, a deal with this tiny agriculture-based country might also seem far more trouble than it’s worth.

New Zealand’s policy elite is still firmly wedded to ‘‘free trade’’ deals, however, and will keep pushing for them until after Trump has left office. And it might well have to wait that long before it sees any signs of progress.

President Trump offers a bad deal.