The Trans-Pacific Partnership without the US may seem like Hamlet without the prince. When talks began in 2010, it was the US that fashioned the TPP by joining an existing trade deal and hugely expanding it, eventually recruiting countries whose economies make up about 40 per cent of global gross domestic product.
It was also the US that drove forward many of the provisions, including protecting cross-border data flows and constraining trade-distorting state-owned enterprises, that mark out the TPP from earlier preferential trade agreements. Nonetheless, following Donald Trump’s decision this year to pull the US out of the deal, the remaining 11 countries at the weekend decided to go ahead on their own.
The consequences of the US president’s go-it-alone approach has been evident throughout his trip to Asia, which comes to an end on Tuesday. The trip has featured plenty of sweeping rhetoric about rebalancing trade across the pacific.