Re: Not so fast
DS999,
To be fair to Trump (ugh!) The TPP was dead at the last US election, since Clinton was against it as well. It used to be the Democrats who were cooler on free trade than the Republicans remember. That all changed with Trump (though it's not like there weren't rumblings of discontent before). So it's not all on him for killing off that policy.
Obviously his bull-in-a-China-shop trade policy is all his own, I can't imagine Clinton, or any other normal politician behaving like that. But then the Chinese government aren't above behaving that way, so I'm short of sympathy - I just don't think it was the right way to go about doing anything.
The thing about trade policy though is that it has to be politically sustainable. Governments can only give so many trade concessions before the electorate make it an issue - and things have to change. I think globalisation reached that point a while back and so while it's going to cost the global economy a lot in lost economic efficiency (and thus wealth generated for everyone), I don't see how politicians can do otherwise than try to onshore some jobs - or at least publicly reduce the obvious piss-taking of governments like China's.
If the Chinese Communist Party were more democratic they'd realise that there's only so much they can poke the West (i.e. their major market) before they get a reaction. The previous regime was I think aware of that, but Xi Jinping appears to be as aggressively nationalist as Trump (if not more) with delusions of grandeur - hence having himself made dictator for life. Whereas the previous system was in no way democratic, but was at least more pluralist and with a recognition that absolute power corrupts, so the leadership was changed every 10 years. These are the people that remember the Mao purges, and therefore why you want to avoid any one person having totaly power, even in a one-party dictatorship.
I don't see the Democrats becoming total fans of free trade overnight, just because their man's in the White House. Hopefully next January. The EU are also building a system of what they call trade defence - which means more tools to target tariffs at specific companies, countries or market sectors where they believe unfair competition is happening. At the same time they EU are also talking about relexing their own competition law in order to allow the EU to effectively subsidise its own big companies to become global champions. Now that Germany has shifted to support France on this, it may happen - as they've often been the swing vote in these sorts of issues - being for free trade when it suits their exporters but sometimes for protectionism at home. Don't know if the Dutch and Scandinavians will be able to block it.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
