Rudderless America

EIGHT years after US President Donald Trump abandoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and unilaterally disarmed the United States in the trade war that he would soon launch against China, his second-term Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, wants to renegotiate the TPP and use it to form a united front against the Chinese.

As Bloomberg explains, Bessent has a “grand encirclement” plan, and if this “sounds familiar, that’s because… [t]he Obama administration’s big trade idea was using the Trans-Pacific Partnership to assemble a coalition of Pacific Rim nations that would increasingly be tied to the US, and not drift into China’s orbit”.

The problem is that resurrecting Barack Obama’s strategy is probably no longer possible.