In TPP talks, Barack Obama loses battle against traditional trade powers
Date August 1, 2015 - 9:01PM
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John Garnaut
Asia Pacific editor for Fairfax Media
VIDEO: TPP trade talks fall short of deal
Trade ministers from the 12 nations negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership in Hawaii fail to reach a deal after marathon talks in Hawaii break down.
It is the old agenda of dairy, sugar and cars that has all-but-killed a trade deal that was billed as the biggest the world has seen in 20 years.
But that's not really what the Trans-Pacific Partnership was meant to be about.
The TPP was about setting rules for an evolving information economy where value lies in "data" more than "goods".
Photo: Trade Minister Andrew Robb says the TPP deal is close to being signed. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen
It was about entrenching the clean, transparent and open norms that are necessary for cross-border services and investments to thrive.
Advertisement And above all it was about injecting balance into Barack Obama's "rebalancing" to Asia, so the US President could reassure partners and allies that he had an economic and diplomatic agenda to match his military one.
"If we don't write the rules, China will write the rules out in that region," said Obama, "We will be shut out."
Illustration: Matt Golding
The TPP was so important that even the US Defence Secretary stretched the limits of his portfolio to make the case.
"Passing TPP is as important to me as another aircraft carrier," said Ashton Carter.
And yet despite its pivotal geo-strategic importance, the Obama administration has allowed this "make-or-break" round of ministerial talks in Hawaii to fail.
The 12 trade ministers from around the Pacific Rim have not yet resigned themselves to the likelihood that four days of exhausting talks and five years of preparations have been futile.
Talks break down but Robb insists deal is close
"We're on the cusp of a transformational agreement, we're not there yet but we're so close," a brave-talking Trade Minister Andrew Robb told Fairfax on Saturday night.
But, realistically, the next best chance of an agreement has been kicked beyond Canada's October election and into the US election season.
In other words, it has been punted out into the Never Never.
The protectionist sticking points did not lie with Australia or any other nation on the Asian side of the Pacific date line.
Some blame lies with Canada, an otherwise open trading nation that insists on pampering the boutique dairy farmers of Quebec. Some blame sits with Mexico, which lavishes taxpayer money on second-rate cars.
But true responsibility lies with an Obama administration that was too weak, too presumptuous and far too late in lobbying its case.
Obama allowed himself to be abandoned by Democrats in Congress and held hostage by Republicans who were beholden to the dairy, sugar, auto and pharmaceutical industries.
Congress had bound his hands so tightly that Obama's Trade Representative, Michael Froman, arrived in Hawaii with too little of value to offer. And he came with too little room to compromise, even when it came to insanely complex "rules of origin" that would have severed global auto production chains and intellectual property laws that would have priced life-saving "biologic" medicines out of reach in developing countries.
The TPP died in Hawaii because the US offer was too miserable to survive.
In Obama's own terms he has just let China "write the rules" in the Asia Pacific. He has sunk one of his own aircraft carrier somewhere in the Pacific.
And if the scorecard in crude geopolitical terms is not actually that grim it is only because China has been kicking so many home goals.
The "pivot" to Asia, which Hillary Clinton initiated when she was Secretary of State, seems destined to continue wobbling precariously until after the US election of November 2016.
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