As
Trump retreats on trade, China moves in
America’s
traditional partners already are turning to Beijing.
By HANS VON DER
BURCHARD AND SIMON MARKS 1/24/17, 8:49 PM CET Updated 1/25/17, 7:34
AM CET
U.S. President
Donald Trump’s crusade against China seemed to backfire on Day One.
Throughout his
election campaign, Trump made clamorous promises to challenge
Beijing’s ascent to global dominance. He vowed to hold the country
to account over currency manipulation and cozied up to Taiwan. He
accused Beijing of saber-rattling in the South China Sea and of
supine support for nuclear-armed North Korea.
But Trump’s first
big move on trade policy — an executive order to withdraw from the
Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal among 12 Pacific Rim
countries — is set to play straight into China’s hands as it
seeks to become the undisputed regional power. Angry over the move,
America’s traditional trade partners have already this week reached
out to Beijing to forge closer commercial ties.
China is perfectly
placed to move into the empty space created by the U.S. withdrawal.
Ironically, one of
the overriding strategic goals of the Trans-Pacific Partnership had
been to triangulate a U.S.-led trade policy that would set
technological and regulatory standards in Asia, which China would be
forced to follow. The accord was a key plank of President Barack
Obama’s “pivot to Asia.”
European
Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmström also criticized Trump’s
protectionist policies on trade and said his policies were “doomed
to fail.”
For the U.S., the
biggest risk now is not that China joins the Trans-Pacific agreement
itself, but that Washington loses leverage over China to tackle the
very business practices that Trump repeatedly criticized during his
election campaign.
“TPP is an
agreement designed for the U.S. way of doing business, with strong
rules on state-owned enterprises, electronic commerce and enforceable
provisions on labor and environmental standards,” said Chad P. Bown
from the Peterson Institute for International Economics. The TPP
withdrawal “is losing a lot of leverage toward China.”
Carrying on without
Trump
Trump’s departure
from TPP has sparked howls of protest from the other 11 members, and
Australia immediately mentioned that there could be room for China to
play a role. “The original architecture was to enable other
countries to join,” Australian Trade Minister Steven Ciobo said
Tuesday, adding that “there would be scope for China.”
Only hours after the
executive order, Chile announced that it would invite China and South
Korea to a meeting of the TPP countries in the coastal resort of Viña
del Mar in March to discuss the future of the agreement without the
U.S.
“The TPP as it was
going forward is off the table. That doesn’t mean that Chile is
going to change tack. We are going to press on in opening up of the
world … as we did in the past, with bilateral deals, and regional
deals,” Chilean Foreign Minister Heraldo Muñoz said.
Singapore, Malaysia
and Mexico all insisted they would continue to explore ways to keep
the Trans-Pacific Partnership alive among the remaining members.
Chinese Foreign
Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said Beijing’s priority would now
be to forge ahead with its own alternative to TPP, known as the
Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), Chinese state
media reported. After Trump signed the order, both Singapore and
Malaysia said that they would look to deepen trade ties with China.
In Washington, alarm
bells sounded.
Republican Senator
John McCain warned that Trump’s move risked handing the
Asia-Pacific region to the Chinese.
“They have now a
very significant economic role, where 60 percent of the world’s
economy is in the Asia-Pacific region, and we are stepping back,”
he said in an interview with CBS News.
“I have talked to
leaders of Asian countries who have all said that this will cede the
field to China. And that, to me, is not good for the United States of
America,” he added.
Countries
such as Japan and Vietnam have strong strategic and security worries
about China that could make a broad deal unlikely.
European Trade
Commissioner Cecilia Malmström also criticized Trump’s
protectionist policies on trade and said his policies were “doomed
to fail.”
Peter Chase, a
senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States,
agreed that Trump had made “a strategic mistake taken for the wrong
reasons.”
“With Mr. Trump
talking about China not playing by the rules, the whole idea of TPP
was trying to encourage and nudge China in that direction and now
that leverage is gone,” he added.
China would be
reluctant to sign up to TPP itself as it would not welcome such
rigorous trading standards, said Chase, who described RCEP as “a
relatively thin deal. It doesn’t have anywhere near the disciplines
that TPP has.”
The Trans-Pacific
Partnership could also prove a difficult format for Beijing for other
reasons: Countries such as Japan and Vietnam have strong strategic
and security worries about China that could make a broad deal
unlikely.
But Karel De Gucht,
the former European trade commissioner, told Belgian television on
Tuesday that Trump’s decision would leave countries in Asia no
choice about which way to shift their trade policy.
“The countries in
the region now have no choice but to rely on China. They have no
alternative,” he said.
Jakob Hanke
contributed reporting.
Authors:
Hans von der
Burchard and Simon Marks
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário