Asia Wonders if Trump Really Means What He Says

[applegrove]

By Joshua Keating at Slate

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/11/23/trump_s_asia_strategy_could_work_out_ok_for_china.html

"SNIP............


There are good economic and legal arguments against the TPP, including the secrecy under which it was negotiated and its controversial provisions on intellectual property. But Trump has never displayed any understanding of these, articulating his opposition to the deal during a debate by saying that the agreement was “designed for China to come in, as they always do, through the back door, and totally take advantage of everyone.” In fact, the agreement explicitly did not include China and was intended in part to help the United States maintain influence in the Asia-Pacific region to counterbalance an increasingly influential China.

Now that the deal’s on the ropes—it’s hard to imagine it happening without the U.S. on board—the governments involved are probably wondering why they spent so much time and energy negotiating the controversial agreement in the first place. “Key Asian allies of the Untied States, I think, are quite concerned because of the amount of bandwidth they’ve put into this,” says Alex Neill, senior fellow for Asia-Pacific Security at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, based in Singapore. “There was a lot of protracted negotiation to reach this agreement. A lot of friends of America in the Asia-Pacific feel that there’s a bit of a vacuum now. China may see this as an opportunity because it was basically bypassed in the TPP.” Indeed, the presidents of China and Russia announced at a summit last weekend that they will push to establish their own free-trade area among East Asian countries.

Trump’s promises to get tough on China were a constant refrain of his campaign, including vows to label China a currency manipulator and even slap a 45 percent tariff on Chinese exports to the United States. But Elizabeth Economy, director of Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, suggests that Beijing probably hasn’t started panicking quite yet. “The U.S. has on multiple occasions and on multiple administrations threated to call China out as a currency manipulator, but at this point there’s a sense that cooler heads will prevail and large multinationals that do business in China would lobby quite hard against the kind of tariffs that he’s been discussing.” Even Trump is probably aware of the impact on consumer prices in the United States that a trade war with China would have, and it’s not unreasonable to expect he won’t be quite the populist crusader against moneyed interests that he promised to be on the stump.

Chinese leaders, who like their American governments stable and predictable, probably preferred Hillary Clinton, but it’s possible that a Trump presidency could work out well for them. If Trump doesn’t actually follow through on his trade war talk, but does kill TPP and follow through on promises to reduce American security commitments to allies, including in Asia, China will be happy. “There are definitely some analysts in China who saw a positive side to a Trump election in the sense that the United States would leave a big vacuum and China could fill that,” says Economy. The leaders of traditional U.S. allies like the Philippines and Malaysia were suggesting they want closer relations with Beijing even before Trump’s election, and if this trend accelerates, it could help Beijing solidify its controversial territorial claims in the South China Sea, claims these countries—with U.S. backing—have traditionally contested, and have been rejected by international courts.


................SNIP"

[applegrove]

1. Trump is not even President and America is losing.

[rzemanfl]

2. So does North America. n/t