Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden was once one of the most ardent cheerleaders for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-nation trade deal that President Obama helped to negotiate but failed to implement.
That’s no longer the case, and the switch shows how deeply trade skepticism has embedded itself into the DNA of his party.
“I would not rejoin the TPP as it was initially put forward. I would insist that we renegotiate pieces of that,” Biden said at a July debate, when a moderator pressed him on the subject. The comments followed several months in which Biden had avoided the subject.
He didn’t say exactly what parts of TPP needed to be renegotiated, beyond that environmental and labor groups should be involved. His campaign declined requests for clarification from the Washington Examiner. Other comments Biden made that night meanwhile appeared to affirm that he still thought the U.S. should eventually join some form of trade deal for Pacific nations.
It was a clear bid to minimize political damage from his past trade stances, said Simon Lester, a trade policy analyst for the Cato Institute. “Criticizing the TPP as it stands now and saying you’ll renegotiate and bring labor to the table, as Biden did, is the safe play,” he said. “It’s unlikely that anyone will ask a follow-up question which demonstrates that you have no idea what you mean by that.”
TPP critics applauded the comments, but said that didn’t mean Biden was getting a pass on the subject.
“It’s good to see Vice President Biden changing course from his past cheerleading for the job-killing Trans-Pacific Partnership,” said Neil Sroka, spokesman for Democracy for America, the Howard Dean-founded liberal advocacy group. “That said, I think, especially given his past votes for other bad trade deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement, it’s going to take more than few words in a debate for Biden to demonstrate he’s truly committed to rejecting any trade deals that allow multinational corporations to get away with everything.”
For most of a 30-plus career on Capitol Hill, Biden was a centrist on trade. He backed NAFTA’s ratification in 1993, supported giving the White House Trade Promotion Authority, aka “fast track,” in 1998, which speeds up passage of trade bills through Congress, and voted in favor of granting China “permanent normal trade relations” in 2000. Biden agreed with the Clinton-era consensus that trade, properly monitored, was a good thing.
Biden made TPP a particular cause as Obama’s vice president. The 12-way deal set up a trade pact with most of the major Pacific Rim economies except China. It was intended to pool the other nations’ economic strength in order to counter Beijing’s power. “The 12 countries at the negotiating table account for 40% — 40% — of the world’s GDP. The TPP nations represent a core constituency for stronger, global economic rules of the road for the 21st century,” Biden said at a joint 2013 press conference with the prime minister of Singapore.
In a 2013 address to George Washington University, Biden argued that backing the deal would compel Asian nations to adopt higher standards on labor rights and the environment as well as open markets for U.S. goods such as cars. “We firmly believe this will create a strong incentive for other nations to raise their standards, as well, so that they can join,” Biden said, adding, “and we’re working hard to get this done this year.”
However, swelling numbers of progressives in the Democratic Party’s ranks undermined the Clinton-era consensus. They argued that trade deals such as NAFTA were bad for labor and the environment and mostly benefited corporations. Simply getting the lapsed Trade Promotion Authority law restored, which was seen by the Obama administration as a prerequisite to getting TPP eventually passed, proved to be a major undertaking. It passed the House in mid-2015 on a narrow 218-208 vote, with only 28 Democrats backing it.
That gave the White House a little over a year to get TPP passed. Biden took the lead in lobbying Congress. “I know a lot of you don’t like TPP, but you’re going to have to see me. I apologize, because they think we get along with each other, so they’re sending me,” he told the House Democratic caucus during a retreat in early 2016, according to the Hill. “All kidding aside, from a strategic foreign policy standpoint … China has no option if we pass this. Their leverage gets removed.”
Biden argued in a 2016 article in Foreign Affairs that TPP did address the various concerns liberal groups had raised. “Thanks to U.S. leadership, the deal includes provisions that will raise international standards for the protection of workers’ rights, the environment, and intellectual property. Absent these rules, the region will likely witness a race to the bottom in the form of weak, low-standard regional trade agreements that exclude the United States.”
Congress never took up TPP despite the Obama administration’s pleas. A combination of Republican antipathy to the administration and Democratic antipathy to the deal sealed its fate. President Trump officially pulled the U.S. out of TPP as one of his first official acts. The other 11 countries instead adopted TPP on their own.
Biden now says that the U.S. should stay out of that group. However, his arguments for that aren’t too different from the ones he previously made in favor of joining it.
“Either China is going to write the rules of the road for the 21st century on trade or we are. We have to join with the 40% of the world that we had with us, and this time make sure that there’s no one sitting at that table doing the deal unless environmentalists are there and labor is there,” Biden said in the same July debate where he said the deal had to be renegotiated. “Otherwise, they are going to write the rules of the road. We must have the rest of the world join us to keep them in check from abusing.”
