The Obama administration is downplaying the fallout from documents leaked from negotiations with Europe over a massive trade deal, and says it’s still pushing to finish the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or TTIP, before President Obama leaves office.
“[W]e certainly are aiming to complete these talks by the end of the year; and I don’t think there’s anything about this leak that’s going to the material impact on our ability to do that,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said in Monday.
Earnest was responding to TTIP documents leaked by Greenpeace, an event that is likely to re-energize opposition to the agreement and make it harder to finish the deal by the end of Obama’s tenure.
Meanwhile, Obama has made it clear that finishing the deal is a real priority. His visit to the world’s largest industrial fair in Hannover, Germany last month was aimed at promoting TTIP and bolstering support for it in Germany, where significant demonstrations against it have flared.
Tom Donohue, head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and 200 other U.S. business leaders joined Obama in Hannover to show their support for TTIP. He said the deal is “an extraordinary opportunity to come together with people from the EU, particularly from Germany, to talk about what we have to do to strengthen our economies and to pass the trade bills that are going to help us do that.”
“No other partnership in the last 70 years has done more to advance global economic growth, establish a robust and fair trading system, and to enforce the democratic opportunity, security and values around the world,” he added.
TTIP supporters now must also convince skeptics that Britain’s possible exit from the EU, to be decided during a June 23 referendum, won’t weaken the pact or make it less effective.
Secretary of State John Kerry ignored the Greenpeace leak on Monday and said that a final agreement is within reach, despite negotiators’ on both sides acknowledgement that numerous major disagreements remain unresolved.
“We’ve just done the TPP; we’re struggling now, working hard,” Kerry said. “We had a very productive weekend … there are still some key things, but we’ve made enough progress to sort of get the final documents somewhere in the next month; so we’re moving,” he said.
Obama also plugged the Trans-Pacific Partnership on Monday, another key piece of his trade agenda.
“If we don’t get the TPP done, American goods will continue to face high tariffs and other trade barriers in the region,” Obama wrote in the Washington Post Monday afternoon. “American businesses will lose competitive access to Asian markets,” he said. “If we don’t get the TPP done, employers across America will lose the chance to compete with other countries’ companies on a level playing field.”
House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., supports TPP but few think Congress will vote on ratification before the election, if at all this year. That could seriously jeopardize Obama’s trade agenda, and if GOP front-runner Donald Trump becomes president, both TPP and TTIP could be dead.
Trump has described TPP as both “bad” and “stupid.”
The prospects of TPP being reintroduced under a President Hillary Clinton aren’t much better. She withheld her endorsement for the finalized TPP, despite having promoted it as secretary of state.
“I would say a failure to pass this before the end of Obama’s term would mean it’s unlikely to be proposed in the future, given the positions staked by Mr. Trump, Sen. [Ted] Cruz and Secretary Clinton,” former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said last week.
Despite its push, however, the White House admitted that getting it ratified before Obama leaves office is a stretch.
“As the president described when he was in Europe just last week, our focus is on trying to complete these negotiations by the end of the year,” Earnest said on Monday. “I do not anticipate that we’re going to able to get Congress to act on it and have this agreement go into affect before the president leaves office but there is the potential.”
