Trump kills the TPP

Trump kills the TPP

I think it’s the right move but I was taken aback to see that Bernie Sanders highly approved of Trump’s decision and offered his support and that Hillary Clinton during the campaign was also in favor of pulling out. It’s enough to make me waver in my own belief!

But seriously do any liberals here also support Trump’s decision?

Not everything related to a politician belongs in Elections. Off to GD.

Basically he has gift wrapped the Pacific region and handed it to China.

Not a liberal, but no. As I understand it, the TPP was organized to prevent the continued growth of China. Given Trump’s intentions to put it to China, this seems like a pretty face-palm-inducing first step.

Now, granted, his goal is to prevent manufacturing jobs from going to Asia, in general, so this could help to damper that. But realistically, it won’t. They’ll just keep going to China.

You were taken aback to see Bernie Sanders approve of Trump doing a thing Bernie Sanders campaigned heavily on?

As a conservative I confess I didn’t pay too close an attention to the Democratic primaries. I just assumed Hillary would win (as indeed she did) so I missed Sander’s position on this and just remembered Hillary was agin it at one time.

A few thoughts…

Pundits (including amateurs like me) have probably misjudged Trump when they describe him as largely absent of ideology. It’s true that he doesn’t recite political mantras that align neatly with republican orthodoxy, but if there’s one area where he’s been somewhat consistent over the years, even going back to some of his comments with journos back in the 80s, it’s his general belief that the developing world taking advantage of us good ole America folk and that something needs to be done about it. The great contradiction is that Trump the guy in front of a microphone is in one sense completely at odds with Trump the global businessman. This is yet another example that underscores an almost pathological need to be heard and seen by as many people as possible. His business exploits stamp his name everywhere, and yet that’s somehow not enough.

But it leads me to this: ordinary people, not Trump, were bearish on TPP and other trade agreements long before Trump and Sanders started talking up the idea of reneging on them formally. Frankly, I have always felt that tearing up and stopping international trade was a bad idea – we will regret this. The problem is that for so long corporate elites ignored the economic consequences of global trade. Worse, intellectual and political elites on the left, while sympathetic to these concerns, in a number of ways joined forces with these corporate interests and sold global trade on the humanitarian grounds of multi-culturalism, global-integration, and so forth. That’s why a lot of Joe Sixpack types refer to some on the political left as “elite”, even though they are probably more concerned about rusted out factories than people like Donald Trump will ever be.

The solution, however, is going to be worse than the disease. A trade war – which is what we’re about to set off, I’m afraid – is going to kill opportunities for many American businesses to expand and find new consumers. And none of this addresses an even more ominous threat to American workers, which is automation. The real solution would be to ensure that we have a basic social safety net that protects people in the event that they can’t find work. That, of course, is something else that will only get worse over the next 4-8 years as republicans take full control over the government.

I’ve got no problem in principle with Trump skillfully renegotiating certain aspects of international trade so that we can restore some of the trade imbalance with other countries. But just wading into deep waters and trying to reshape the way we’ve done business for decades without much forethought is potentially disastrous.

Whether it’s China that is in a position to pick up the pieces is unknown. China has its own challenges ahead. But one thing that’s increasingly clear is that America under Trump seems to be giving up its position as a global power broker. That will inevitably leave a power vacuum. Whether that’s filled by one nation like China, or perhaps many like China, Russia, Japan, and Germany, that turn of events will have consequences.

I have no opinion on the TPP. Trade deals are good when they’re good and not when they’re not. No one, including in this thread, has revealed enough details to figure out whether this trade deal is more good than bad.

I am not surprised that Trump or Sanders would sign an order killing the TPP. I’d be slightly more surprised if Clinton did but only because it is a useless gesture since it was DIW anyway since she was against it.

In general, it’s possible to negotiate a bad trade deal, especially with countries that are enough unlike you that it’s difficult to know what is fair and what is not, let alone actually achieve it. Due to this, I think Trump’s overtures to England regarding free trade are more likely to succeed. I think that an EU-style borderless free trade area among the Anglosphere is something we should pursue, although it would be in no country’s interest to have a more centralized governance because it would either be dominated by or dominate the US relative to population (plus I don’t think the rest of the Anglosphere would allow the US unrestricted entry until we have UHC.)

You are really remarkably ill-informed in the United States if you are unsure that the power vaccum is not going to be filled by China. The Chinese are going all over Eurasia and Africa arriving on shores with bags of cash and building (in Trumpian terms) Yuuge infrastructure projects.

The TPP was far from a perfect deal. But what it did was integrate traditional US allies into a US-led economic market; while keeping China out. Thats gone now. China is now literally the only open shop in town.

Already the Far Eastern countries (who do large volumes of trade with China) are becoming closer and closer to China, they have their own alternative to TPP; the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership.. Most of your dumped TPP buddies are in it. Its going to go ahead now.

If Trump had scuttled the US Fleet he could not have reduced the US’s influence in the Pacific more.

ETA: Really? Angloshere? Most of which consist of countries the size and population of a small US State? Unless you bring in the non-white commonwalth of India, Pakistan, Nigeria etc into it. That, I somehow doubt will happen.

I didn’t say that the vacuum couldn’t or wouldn’t be filled by China, but when that will happen and to what extent is something that’s hard to predict at the moment. Bear in mind, China’s growth has been, to no small extent, fueled by access to the American market and also by American investors doing business in that country. It’s true that China’s probably less dependent on the US now than in the past, but Trump’s policies could prove injurious to China (and to the US as well of course). Suffice it to say, if the US initiates trade and political policies that are hostile to China, nobody can say exactly what those repercussions will be. Furthermore, a lot of Asian countries, though eager to deepen economic ties to China, are wary of what that could mean in terms of regional political stability. There are nationalist elements throughout Asia that are extremely skeptical in terms of giving China too much leverage.

Hillary was for the TPP when she visited Eastern countries 45 times to promote it, and against it to attract the Bernie voters until she had won the election and could be for it once more. And complicating that was her avowed maintenance of having both a Public and a Private opinion on any issue. And the fact there are both TPP ( basically Pacific Rim ) and TTIP ( basically Atlanticist ) to confuse the issue, both of which inspired riots from the left in many countries and both of which the governing elites felt would be better explained by being put into practice rather than confusing people’s silly little heads beforehand, muddled the matter even without opportunist value-free politicians such as Trump or Hillary making judgements that pander to the moment rather than slowly considered decision.

Opposition to free trade is a populist position, not really a “liberal” or “conservative” thing.

Clinton was very likely lying, and a Clinton administration would have insisted on some superficial changes and signed it, which would have been a good thing for the American people. The death of TPP will cost Americans a great many jobs and a lot of money, and will increase China’s relative power in the Pacific and Far East. Nonetheless, it wins votes, because protectionism appeals to people’s immediate gratification while free trade, while good for everyone on the whole, is conceptually hard to understand and the benefits are very spread out.

Signing a free trade deals with countries that specifically speak English instead of countries where there’s a strategic purpose to doing so is a bizarre, pointless exercise. What’s special about Ireland that the US should have a deal with them, but not Malaysia or Peru? The word “Anglosphere” is literally a more recent invention than NAFTA and Trump wants to get rid of that.

The basic thought process of those who reject it is that, while it would increase our influence in the region to combat China’s, we would gain that influence at the cost of our domestic job market, particularly in the manufacturing sector. More generally, it was thought to be overly complex and had too many special interest provisions.

I don’t know enough about it and trade policy in general to say either way.

Wasn’t it already dead? No way Congress would approve this, or was it set up so that it didn’t need approval?

The Anglosphere contains the vast majority of fully-developed countries that are not in the EU and thus already have their trade group. If Japan or the non-EU Scandinavian countries wanted to join and everyone was cool with that I could go along with that too. If there were free trade and free movement between fully developed countries, no one can argue that “dey tuk are yerbs” because everyone’s free to move to where the yerbs are. If the same were to happen between unequally-developed countries, there would be a massive influx to the richer countries, while the only people who would want to go to the poorer countries would be upper-middle-class and rich retirees who would then be resented as “colonialists”.

This is completely consistent with Trump’s rhetoric during the campaign, entirely in accord with his ideology (such as it is), and stupid. What others have said about China moving into the trade vacuum is correct. Free trade in general is a good thing; Trump’s ideas on the subject in general are stupid.

I have no idea if Hillary would have signed the deal. She was for it before she was against it. It’s possible she would have put so many caveats and restrictions about environmental issues and wage restrictions and heaven knows what that it would not have gotten thru Congress, or had the desired effect had it passed.

An economic issue where Trump, Sanders, and (sort of) Hillary are in agreement. Therefore almost by definition it’s wrong.

Regards,
Shodan

This is what Terry McAuliffe stated in July when he promised Hillary would go back on whatever she told the electorate.
Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, longtime best friend to the Clintons, said Tuesday that he believes Hillary Clinton will support the TPP trade deal if elected president, with some tweaks.

Politico
By the way, I left out some vital acronyms: there are also the TPA, the RCE, the FTAAP, and the AGOA to think of as well as the TPP and the TTIP to bear in mind
Trade Terms Revealed

Trade negotiators have a blast.

Why would you have been taken aback? Both Sanders and Trump campaigned on populist trade protectionist drivel, so of course Sanders was and is happy that Trump followed through on the madness. He’ll be cheering Trump as he tries to go after NAFTA and impose tariffs and trade restrictions as well.

Certainly there are a lot who do, though this might be a case of ‘because it’s from Trump’ that they are letting their actual ideology be twisted by their hatred of the one who is proposing it (sort of like Republicans who were knee jerk against Obama even though things like the TPP are exactly what Republicans SHOULD be all for). Certain types of left wing liberals have always felt that the US should protect our own markets and put all sorts of tariffs and trade restrictions on other countries for a variety of reasons. Both Trump and Sanders were all about protecting American jobs and salaries from dirty ferriners who wanna tek em fum usen, blah blah blah. Neither of them seemingly believe in free trade or in the aspects of the TPP that would help the US position globally, nor grasp why NAFTA is good for the US overall.

That’s a fascinating claim. Among developed countries that aren’t in the “Anglosphere” are Japan and South Korea, which just between them are a vastly larger market than Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK and Ireland combined.

And why is “Fully developed” important? New Zealand is “fully developed,” I’d assume, but its economy is no bigger than Peru’s. Why is trade with New Zealand more important than trade with Peru? Or Chile?

More pertinently, I don’t see a strategic advantage to the United States in negotiating a trade deal with a windswept, neutral little island in the North Atlantic like Ireland. The idiot who just cancelled TPP is the same idiot who keeps babbling about how “Jina” is evil and not playing fair. The entire point of TPP was for countries that AREN’T “Jina” to create trade advantages among themselves.

When Amnesty International (I can’t find better cites for Amnesty Int’l right now but they exist), The Electronic Frontier Foundation, The Sierra Club and The United Steelworkers Union–none of them “right wing” organization are united in opposing the TPP, you can be pretty sure it’s impossibly flawed legislation.

I’m largely in support of free trade, but only like 5 of the ~30-ish sections actually dealt with trade and the rest was secretive policy-setting crap.