via The Prospect

About the Author

Clyde Prestowitz is the author of Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions. He is also president of the Economic Strategy Institute, a nonprofit research organization in Washington, D.C.

America needs to try something new when it comes to international trade.

On November 12, 2011, I listened as President Barack Obama told business leaders attending the Summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Honolulu that “we’ve turned our attention back to the Asia Pacific region” and announced two vehicles for that return. These were the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Free Trade Agreement, now under negotiation and to be concluded by the end of this year, and the Pivot to Asia, meaning a redeployment of American priorities and military forces away from Europe and the Middle East to Asia.

The president said that Asia will be central to America’s future prosperity and that it was imperative to correct unsustainable trade and financial imbalances while continuing to expand economic ties. This would require that all countries play by the same rules appropriate to the current global economy. The TPP, he said, would be a template for a “21st-century agreement” that would eventually be open to all the countries of the region. He emphasized that this kind of agreement can thrive only in an environment of security and stability, and he underscored that the Pivot to Asia “will allow America to keep its commitments to its allies” in a region characterized by competing territorial claims, uncertain energy supplies, and North Korea’s nuclear threats.

In closing, however, he stressed that neither the Pivot nor the TPP is aimed at any particular country—which, of course, meant that it is. The country is China. But these initiatives are also about responding to the pleas of Asian friends, the importuning of U.S. global corporations, papering over inconsistent goals, denying American commercial decline, and clinging to the quasi--American empire.

Obama accurately posed the challenges. But do these twin policies accurately define American interests? Are they plausible strategies for achieving them? These key questions have received surprisingly little attention.

As it has evolved so far at least, the TPP is anchored in the same orthodox free-trade philosophy that has inspired every U.S. trade negotiation and agreement since the end of World War II. It is also following the same negotiation process as all the old deals. Indeed, the agenda and initial text were largely lifted from the failed Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation trade agreement of the 1990s and the more recent U.S.–Korea Free Trade Agreement. These texts have been broadened a bit to try to cover some new topics like state-owned enterprises, but essentially they are no different from what has gone before both in substance and procedure. We can’t know the result yet, but in the past, the U.S. trade imbalance has widened after each new agreement.

A New Sun

The foreign minister of a Southeast Asian country once told me that China is like a new sun entering the American solar system. All the planets, he said, are now shifting their orbital patterns, and the Asian planets especially are entering into orbit around the Chinese sun.

He was correct, and this fact has important implications for both the planets and the suns. This same foreign minister made the point that China’s is a hierarchical worldview in which each country and person has an assigned position that is either up or down. In this hierarchy, he said, my country’s position is definitely down, and we therefore prefer not to be controlled by China. On the other hand, he added, there are nice economic benefits in China’s orbit. So, we’d like to be in that orbit but with U.S. gravity keeping it wide and loose.

Just so. The rest of Asia is growing, thanks to its Chinese connections, but also fears being overwhelmed. This concern of smaller Asian nations has been exacerbated by the recent rapid displacement of U.S.–made products and technologies in world markets. Despite keeping several of its 11 aircraft carriers and more than 100,000 troops in the region and being the biggest buyer of Asia’s exports, America is said somehow to be ignoring Asia. Thus some governments, such as Singapore, Malaysia, and Vietnam, call for the U.S. to demonstrate renewed commitment by entering into more free-trade agreements and security arrangements. This is partly sincere but is also partly special pleading aimed at allowing them to continue their free ride on America’s unilateral security commitments and open markets.