Analysis: TPP’s real value for U.S. is national security, experts say

Making trade easier for companies in the United States is important, but the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement is as much about the nation’s strategic interests in Asia.    President Obama made his first official visit to Vietnam last week to promote free trade, witness the signing of an order from a Vietnamese airline for 100 Boeing 737 airliners and lift a ban on arms sales to the Southeast Asian nation four decades after the U.S. ended its war there. He also stopped in Japan.
   Vietnam and Japan are both part of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement, a massive trade deal involving 12 nations with 40 percent of the world’s Gross Domestic Product. However, the free trade agreement, a major Obama priority following more than six years of negotiations, is on shaky ground in the United States in large measure because the presidential candidates have turned it into a referendum on the plight of the middle class, wage stagnation and lost manufacturing in the United States.
   Sen. Bernie Sanders, D.-Vt., has run a populist campaign that trashes trade deals for benefitting multinational corporations and harming their workers by outsourcing good jobs overseas. His popularity is believed by many to have influenced Hillary Clinton’s decision last fall to oppose the TPP. Meanwhile, on the Republican side, Donald Trump has made trade bashing a major theme, saying the United States has been the victim of poor negotiators and that he would pick better teams to write the terms in the U.S.’s favor.
   The increasing popular anger toward the status quo has caused many members of Congress in both parties to withhold support for TPP so far.
   The prospects for ratification this year appear grim, with some seeing the only chance for passage during a lame duck session after the November election when it is believed lawmakers could vote their conscience with more freedom.
   Failure to enact the TPP would hurt U.S. interests, which extend beyond the economic benefits of lower tariffs and opening doors for U.S. companies in restrictive market, according to experts. The Obama administration has tried to pivot its foreign policy towards Asia in recognition of its economic growth and technological dynamism, which is somewhat threatened by China’s aggressive posture. The TPP is seen by the Obama administration and its partners as a way of showing U.S. commitment to the region and upholding international law, free commerce and other shared values, and strengthening the U.S. defense posture.
   “The TPP is strategically vital to the future of the United States and Asia, and if you want to believe in the pivot or rebalance, it is absolutely critical to the success of the rebalance,” Doug Paal, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said on National Public Radio’s ‘Diane Rehm Show.’ “The U.S. will gain. The TPP opens markets that are not supervised by previous trade agreements that involve trade barriers at the border. It gets into those societies and opens them to services, which are high-value opportunities for American businesses who lead in the world of services.”
   Greg Poling, director of the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative and a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said TPP isn’t “fundamentally about what it does for the GDP of the U.S. It’s about the geopolitical win here, that the U.S. gets to set the rules of the road.”
   In fact, China, in the midst of an economic reform initiative designed to increase domestic consumption and reduce dependence on exports, could very much itself seek to join the TPP in three to five years “to unlock the services benefits for its population and employment,” Paal added.
   In a recent blog critiquing Donald Trump’s positions, William Reinsch, a distinguished fellow at The Stimson Center who retired in April as head of the National Foreign Trade Council, stressed that trade deals are often tools for achieving broader strategic goals.
   “Trade negotiations are not always about trade. Sometimes they’re about other things. The anti-trade lobbyists have recognized that in their argument that trade negotiations are about power (shifting from the people to large companies) rather than trade. To focus solely on market access gains and losses looks at trade agreements from only one perspective, which is not always the most important one,” he wrote. “The Bahrain FTA, for example, wasn’t about trade; it was about the 5th Fleet and security in the Persian Gulf. Colombia wasn’t just about Colombia; it was also about Venezuela, and so on. If Trump doesn’t see that, he may win a few battles, but he’ll lose all the wars.”
   “The United States is the global leader. We have broad and diverse interests all over the world, and achieving some of our goals generally means postponing or sacrificing others. Put plainly — criticizing a trade agreement for not achieving all our trade goals is a cheap shot that ignores our larger interests.”
   Poling said there is “a moderate chance” TPP gets passed in the lame duck session, otherwise it will be a minimum of two years in the next administration before Congress approves it.
   “The recent pattern is that when [trade deals] are delayed into the end of an administration, they get kicked into the next administration,” Paal said. “Then they declare they have some new standards that need to be met, and they find a way to meet them because — these agreements are too important to the economy and to our strategic position to allow them to lie fallow.”
   Kurt Campbell, chief executive officer of The Asia Group and former assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs under President Obama from 2009 to 2013, said he was a bit more optimistic “that we will summon the political will and skill to get this through.”
   “I know that that is not a widely held view at this time,” Campbell said. “But I will say, almost every trade agreement in our history has gone through the longest, darkest tunnel before the glimmer of light at the end. And we’re in the middle of that tunnel now. And I’m hopeful that we can just see that pinpoint of light ahead that will steer us towards what is undeniably the most important region and set of opportunities for the United States lying on the horizon.”
   Reinsch speculated that Clinton is authentically skeptical of free trade deals, but what sets her apart from Sanders is her apparent willingness to find ways to make them work.
   In the third of three blog posts, Reinsch said that Sanders and many social justice organizations have been effective in opposing trade by casting it as a power struggle between corporations over the common people.