Throughout the years of arcane and secretive talks that culminated in this week’s Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, participants have brushed aside the notion that the TPP was designed to exclude China. This was not, its advocates protested loudly, an “anyone but China club”. Perhaps too loudly.
Those assertions strained credulity. When their guard slipped, the TPP’s cheerleaders often spoke of the new pact not in terms of economics but of geopolitics. The TPP in its realpolitik guise was the economic complement to Washington’s military pivot to Asia, a means of binding the US more closely to its Asian allies in the face of a resurgent China. In a much-discussed recent paper for the Council on Foreign Relations, Robert Blackwill and Ashley Tellis wrote that the TPP should be seen as part of “grand strategy” to push back against China’s rise. By signing preferential trade deals with allies, Washington could help stop China from freeriding on the international trading system and counter what they called Beijing’s “geoeconomic power”. Even this week, Barack Obama, the US president who has pinned much hope on the TPP’s
legacy-burnishing effects, could not resist a dig at Beijing. “We can’t let countries like China write the rules of the global economy,” he said.