US president-elect Donald Trump has issued a video outlining his policy plans for his first 100 days in office and vowing to issue a note of intent to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) “from day one.”
In the brief clip posted to YouTube on Monday, Trump said that “our transition team is working very smoothly, efficiently and effectively,” contradicting a wealth of media reports telling of chaos at Trump Tower as he struggles to build a team.
He said that he was going to issue a note of intent to withdraw from the TPP, calling it “a potential disaster for our country.”
Photo: AFP
Instead he said he would “negotiate fair bilateral trade deals that bring jobs and industry back.”
Hours before Trump’s announcement, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said that the TPP would be “meaningless” without US participation.
Speaking to reporters in Buenos Aires on Monday, Abe conceded that other TPP countries had not discussed how to rescue the agreement if Trump carried out his promise to withdraw.
The TPP, which excludes China, is thought to have been high on Abe’s agenda when he became the first foreign leader to meet the president-elect in New York last week.
While details of their 90-minute meeting have not been released, Abe would have used the time to try to persuade Trump to go back on his campaign threat to pull the US out of the TPP.
“The TPP would be meaningless without the United States,” Abe said, after Japan and other TPP countries had discussed the agreement on the sidelines of the APEC summit in Lima at the weekend.
Abe invested considerable political capital in pushing for TPP, which was signed last year, but has yet to be ratified.
Last week he told a Japanese parliamentary committee that Trump’s threat, if carried out, could bolster moves toward a trade pact that includes China.
“There’s no doubt that there would be a pivot to the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership [RCEP] if the TPP doesn’t go forward,” Abe told an upper house committee, according to Kyodo news agency. “The RCEP doesn’t include the United States, leaving China the economy with the largest gross domestic product.”
The RCEP comprises Japan, China and 12 other Asian countries, plus Australia and New Zealand, and has been under negotiation since 2013.
“The US leaving TPP is a problem of America rejecting globalization,” said Da Wei (達巍), an expert on the US at the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations. “China is a beneficiary of globalization and China is not willing to see the tide of globalization ebb.”
While some Chinese might be happy at what they see as a political failure for the US, ultimately “China disapproves of this, China is anxious about the retreat of globalization,” Da said.
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