Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden said Wednesday that he now opposes the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-nation trade deal for which the Obama administration sought congressional approval. Biden, then vice president, was involved in lobbying lawmakers to back the deal.
“I would not rejoin the TPP as it was initially put forward. I would insist that we renegotiate pieces of that with the Pacific nations … so that we could bring them together to hold China accountable,” Biden said during the Democratic presidential debate Wednesday. Biden did not elaborate on why he no longer supported the deal or how it needed to be changed.
Biden nevertheless argued that the U.S. had to be involved in setting trade policy in the Pacific. “Either China is going to write the rules of the road on trade, or we are,” Biden said.
The language was similar to the arguments he made in favor of the TPP deal as vice president for President Barack Obama. “I think it’s very, very important to understand that the 20th century rules of the road no longer exist, and new ones have to be written, and we should write them,” he said in 2015.
TPP would have included all major pacific rim economies except for China. The Obama administration endorsed the proposal, but despite lobbying heavily, could not get Congress to bring it up for a vote before the administration ran out. President Trump, who ran against the deal in 2016, formally ended the U.S.’ participation in it as one of his earliest acts as president.
