Donald Trump Walks Back Eagerness to Rejoin TPP; Demands 'Better Deal'
- by Derrick Holloway
- in World
- — Apr 15, 2018
"We'll put a team together, but we haven't even done-I mean, it just happened a couple of hours ago", said Larry Kudlow, Trump's top economic adviser.
"The Trump administration would have had a strong hand if it had insisted on renegotiating TPP when the president took office in January 2017", Alden said. "This whole trade thing has exploded ..." "There is no deadline".
While the news should be music to the ears of trade organizations such as the Footwear Distributors & Retailers of America and the American Apparel & Footwear Association - which both made an aggressive push for the U.S.to remain in the agreement past year - FDRA president and CEO Matt Priest said he's holding off on a full-on celebration. This will include the countries in TPP, which are very important. With congressional elections later this year, he now faces pressure from some Republican lawmakers anxious that his protectionist policies could spiral into a trade war with China that would hit rural America.
And then there's the other trillion-dollar question: "How receptive will the other 11 nations be to welcoming the US back?"
As trade tensions with China escalate, President Donald Trump has found new appeal in a regional trade pact he once called a "rape of our country". Asian stocks climbed as equities in Japan and Australia advanced.
Mr Michael Miller, chairman of US Wheat Associates and a farmer in Washington, said rejoining the deal would allow his industry to compete on a level playing field with competitors in Australia and Canada, which both stayed in the accord.
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Rejoining the pact could be a complex task.
Heated discussions concerning possible re-negotiations of TPP are expected to bubble up during Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's upcoming working visit to Mar-a-Lago resort on April 17. That could complicate talks as Japan maintains that it has already given all the concessions it could, said trade expert William Reinsch of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.
Yoshihide Suga, Japan's chief cabinet secretary, reportedly compared the TPP to a "glasswork," noting that "It's hard to bring part of the pact and renegotiate it", as it's already "well-balanced".
It is also unclear how serious Mr Trump is about rejoining.
Director of National Government Relations Robert White says it could help alleviate some of the financial pain farmers are feeling as a result of back-and-forth tariffs with China. He had "kept his promise to end the TPP deal negotiated by the Obama administration because it was unfair to American workers and farmers", she said.
Trump has talked about rejoining the deal before, but only if the USA gets substantially better terms - which would take even more diplomatic wrangling to secure.
