Can TPP go ahead without America?

WHEN, three days after his inauguration, Donald Trump pulled America out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a 12-country free-trade deal that his predecessor, Barack Obama, wanted to be his legacy in Asia, it was the fulfilment of a campaign promise. “Great thing for the American worker, what we just did,” he said, as he signed away new markets for American carmakers, farmers and drugs companies, along with the prospect of over 100,000 new American jobs.

Among the other 11 members, the shock was not just over the new president’s hostility to America’s historical role as promoter of an open, rules-based trading order, of which the Asia-Pacific region has been the greatest beneficiary. Without the United States, which accounted for three-fifths of the bloc’s combined GDP, TPP was, in the words of the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, “meaningless”. After all the sweat and political capital expended in crafting the agreement, which was signed in late 2015 but which only Japan has ratified, TPP was, nearly everyone agreed, now fit only to be buried.