The US-led Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade pact — which Taiwan is hoping to join — is under threat, as it faces increasing opposition in the US Congress.
About 60 Republicans in the US House of Representatives this week announced they might join their Democratic counterparts in opposing a bill that would give US President Barack Obama “fast track” authority to seal the deal with 11 other Pacific countries.
Fast track would let Congress approve or reject the trade deal without amendments.
Most Democrats are against the bill and with even limited Republican help may be able to stop it.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the force suddenly driving Republicans against the bill is a “deep distrust of Obama as an international negotiator.”
The newspaper said that Republican suspicion took center stage this month in public challenges to Obama’s nuclear negotiations with Iran.
“The president’s foreign policy, in my view, has been one continuous misstep after another, so why should we trust him to do a fast-track policy on something that’s so important with so many nations?” Republican Representative Steve Russell said.
This comes as negotiations to launch the TPP are entering their final stages.
Heavy lobbying is now under way by the Republican leadership to bring all party members back into line and support the TPP, while the White House is busy fighting for at least some Democratic votes for the trade pact.
Taiwan hopes to join the pact in a second round of talks to expand the deal later this year.
“The negotiation’s failure would have devastating consequences for US leadership, for the deepening of key partnerships in strategic regions, for the promotion of market reforms in emerging economies and for the future of the trade agenda,” said Mireya Solis, senior fellow in East Asia Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution.
The window of opportunity to cinch a TPP deal is closing fast, Solis said.
She said that passage of the fast track authority — also known as the trade promotion authority (TPA) — is “essential” as a political device to give complex trade agreements a chance at successful negotiation and ratification.
“First and foremost, we need to pass TPA in the Congress,” Solis said.
“Every week that goes by without movement on TPA reduces the prospect that trade policy could be the one area immune to the dysfunctional political climate in Washington,” she said.
“Quite simply, without TPA, there is no TPP,” Solis said.
Representative to the US Shen Lyu-shun (沈呂巡) recently said that TPP membership was “a must” for the next stage of Taiwan’s national development.
The 12 countries currently involved in negotiations account for about 40 percent of global economic output and more than one-third of world trade.
Shen says that joining the pact is “vital” for Taiwan to keep up with increasingly tough competition, particularly from South Korea.
TPP would give the US leverage in the decade ahead as it begins negotiations with second-round entrants, said Patrick Cronin, senior director of the Asia-Pacific security program at the Center for a New American Security.
“This could be a major tool for engaging China, given that our clear objective is to integrate a rising China not to contain it,” he said.
“It also gives us a potential tool for managing Taiwan, whose growing dependence on the mainland is leaving it little international space for avoiding coercion,” Cronin said.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) yesterday voiced dissatisfaction with the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans- Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), whose latest meeting, concluded earlier the same day, appeared not to address the country’s application. In a statement, MOFA said the CPTPP commission had "once again failed to fairly process Taiwan’s application," attributing the inaction to the bloc’s "succumbing to political pressure," without elaborating. Taiwan submitted its CPTPP application under the name "Separate Customs Territory of Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen and Matsu" on Sept. 22, 2021 -- less than a week after China
ALIGNED THINKING: Taiwan and Japan have a mutual interest in trade, culture and engineering, and can work together for stability, Cho Jung-tai said Taiwan and Japan are two like-minded countries willing to work together to form a “safety barrier” in the Indo-Pacific region, Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) yesterday said at the opening ceremony of the 35th Taiwan-Japan Modern Engineering and Technology Symposium in Taipei. Taiwan and Japan are close geographically and closer emotionally, he added. Citing the overflowing of a barrier lake in the Mataian River (馬太鞍溪) in September, Cho said the submersible water level sensors given by Japan during the disaster helped Taiwan monitor the lake’s water levels more accurately. Japan also provided a lot of vaccines early in the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic,
THE GOOD WORD: More than 100 colleges on both sides of the Pacific will work together to bring students to Taiwan so they can learn Mandarin where it is spoken A total of 102 universities from Taiwan and the US are collaborating in a push to promote Taiwan as the first-choice place to learn Mandarin, with seven Mandarin learning centers stood up in the US to train and support teachers, the Foundation for International Cooperation in Higher Education of Taiwan (FICHET) said. At the annual convention of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages held over the weekend in New Orleans, Louisiana, a Taiwan Pavilion was jointly run by 17 representative teams from the FICHET, the Overseas Community Affairs Council, the Steering Committee for the Test of Proficiency-Huayu, the
A home-style restaurant opened by a Taiwanese woman in Quezon City in Metro Manila has been featured in the first-ever Michelin Guide honoring exceptional restaurants in the Philippines. The restaurant, Fong Wei Wu (豐味屋), was one of 74 eateries to receive a “Michelin Selected” honor in the guide, while one restaurant received two Michelin stars, eight received one star and 25 were awarded a “Bib Gourmand.” The guide, which was limited to restaurants in Metro Manila and Cebu, was published on Oct. 30. In an interview, Feng Wei Wu’s owner and chef, Linda, said that as a restaurateur in her 60s, receiving an
RSS