President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership had other countries looking immediately on Monday for new trade partners.
Chile plans to pursue bilateral trade deals with some of the countries that would have been in TPP, but it will also look to the United States chief rival in the Asia-Pacific region. “The South American country has proposed meetings with TPP members as well as China and South Korea and has had positive reactions at a high level,” Reuters reported, following remarks by Chilean Foreign Minister Heraldo Munoz.
Those bilateral talks leave the open the possibility of negotiations with the United States, given Trump’s preference for these one-on-one deals.
“The beautiful thing about a bilateral agreement is that if any one of the true parties in the agreement decides at any time they want to get out of the agreement, or they’re not being treated fairly, they can renegotiate much easier,” White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters on Monday. “In a multilateral agreement, that’s not the case.”
Proponents of TPP argue that wasn’t necessary and they caution that Trump will struggle to negotiate multiple trade deals.
“The market access negotiations have been conducted bilaterally, so there is a fair amount of bilateralism embedded in the agreement, but then you had all the benefits of multilateralism added to that in terms of rules that apply across the board,” Mireya Solís, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told the Washington Examiner.
“The problem with the bilaterals is we actually have tried that approach and we found that it is extremely time-consuming,” she said. “So, none of these new bilaterals being discussed in the Trump administration are going to materialize overnight. They take a lot of time to negotiate — years, probably — and they tend to generate rules that are idiosyncratic.”
Trump will have “fast-track” authority to have trade deals approved or rejected without being amended for the next four years, but he hopes to cut a deal in short order with the United Kingdom.
“We’re gonna work very hard to get it done quickly and done properly,” he said before his inauguration. “Good for both sides.”
Chile’s interest in a variety of bilateral deals tends to corroborate Solis’ prediction that Trump has given other countries an incentive to be less dependent on the United States, which she worries “will diminish U.S. influence.” If Trump’s deals get bogged down, according to Solís, the failure will hurt the economic prospects of some of the working class families who rallied around Trump because of his opposition to the trade agreement.
“If we have less access to these markets, we’re going to have fewer opportunities to create jobs in the export sector,” she said. “Also, if we decide to tax imports, there are a lot of people in this country dependent on imports and we’re also going to see people lose their jobs.”
