“The Pacific Ocean,” prophesied William H Seward in 1852, “its shores, its islands and the vast regions beyond, will become the chief theatre of events in the world’s great hereafter.”
He was right. Just as, in the 18th century, the world’s economic center of gravity shifted from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, so in the 21st century, it is shifting from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
That is reason alone for the Biden administration to take the United States back into what is now rather clunkily called the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership or CPTPP, the 11-member trade association which was negotiated under the Obama administration, but from which President Trump withdrew shortly before it came into force.
Obama’s “Pacific pivot” was as much strategic as it was economic. Freer trade with the world’s fastest-growing economies made sense in itself, but there was also a conscious decision to reassert American leadership in a region that was increasingly feeling the force of Chinese economic dominance.
When the U.S. pulled out of the agreement, China saw its opportunity and began wooing the other members. On Nov. 19, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership was signed in Indonesia. RCEP became a gargantuan trade bloc bringing together China, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, and all ten members of ASEAN.
It is a sorry state of affairs when American protectionism allows China to present itself as the chief defender of open sea-lanes and a rules-based global trading order. China sees trade primarily as a tool of foreign policy. Despite its trade agreement with Australia, for example, it has banned a number of Australian imports and slapped prohibitive tariffs on others in retaliation for Australian calls for an inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus. Many states in the Asia-Pacific region have been coerced through trade and investment deals into backing China on Hong Kong, Tibet, and Taiwan.
Given the choice, most Asian countries would prefer to join an American-led trading association. The U.S. market is seen as more open, and the government as less capricious. In any case, CPTPP is deeper and more ambitious, and thus more valuable, than RCEP. But it requires a conscious act of engagement from Washington.
You might think that Joe Biden would be eager to pick up where he had left off. He is filling his administration with Obama-era grandees and dynasts, and the logic which drove the Pacific pivot in the first place has only strengthened over the past four years — especially over the past 10 months, as the epidemic hit Europe’s economies harder than East Asia’s.
The trouble is that, in the U.S. as around the world, the coronavirus has also made people warier, more introverted, more protectionist. Many Republicans who used to be reliable free-traders now talk darkly about the need to re-shore jobs and profits — whether because they are responding to the Trumpification of their base or because they never truly believed in open markets in the first place. Democrats, for their part, know that their base was anti-trade all along. Biden was forced to promise during the election that “as president, I will not enter into any new trade agreements until we have invested in Americans and equipped them to succeed in the global economy.”
To be fair, there are legitimate objections to the CPTPP. It has too much to say about standardization and not enough about mutual recognition. It contains chapters on environmental and labor standards that do not properly belong in a trade accord. But these drawbacks are more than outweighed by the gain of an almost entirely tariff-free Pacific. And there is every reason to hope that some — perhaps one day all — CPTPP members will deepen their relationship over time, ideally aiming to copy the all-encompassing trade deal between Australia and New Zealand.
What right have I, a British columnist, to advise the U.S. on its trade policy? Well, cousins, I’m not suggesting anything that I am not also urging on my own country. Britain declared its intention to join CPTPP shortly after Brexit, and there is every reason to expect our membership to come into effect in 2021.
You might reasonably ask by what geographical logic is the United Kingdom joining a Pacific trade pact. It is true that, other than in the technical sense of owning the Pitcairn Islands (population 50 — almost all descendants of the Bounty mutineers), we are not a Pacific country. But we have exceptionally close relations with common-law, English-speaking CPTPP states such as Canada, Singapore, and Australia — and, of course, with the U.S., whose own center of economic gravity has been tilting gradually toward the Pacific ever since it became a nation. So let’s not waste any more time.
