President Barack Obama infamously killed the multilateral Doha Round last December by instructing his representative at the World Trade Organisation to be a “rejectionist” negotiator. He compounded the folly by instead floating the trans-Pacific Trade Initiative that is conceived in a spirit of confronting China rather than promoting trade, and is also a cynical surrender to self-seeking Washington lobbies that would have made John Kenneth Galbraith blush. Not content with these body blows to the world trading system, which his predecessors had built up over decades of US leadership, Mr Obama pulled off the remarkable feat of making things yet worse with his State of the Union address.
美国总统巴拉克•奥巴马(Barack Obama)授意美驻世贸组织(WTO)代表作一名“说不的”谈判者，以这种不光彩的手段扼杀了去年12月的多哈回合多边谈判。后来他错上加错地提出了“跨太平洋贸易倡议”(trans-Pacific Trade Initiative)。外界认为，该倡议的主旨在于对抗manbetx3.0 ，而不是促进贸易；此外，它还是对追逐私利的华盛顿游说势力的一次悲观屈服——如果约翰•肯尼思•加尔布雷斯(John Kenneth Galbraith)活着的话，会为此举感到脸红。奥巴马并不满足于自己给世界贸易体系（该体系是其多届前任在美国称霸世界的数十年间建立起来的）带来的这些重创，通过近日发表的国情咨文演说，他实现了一项了不起的成就：让局面变得更糟。