Enemies in politics and opposed on nearly all fronts, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have found themselves united together against Barack Obama and a tradition that has kept America in charge of the world economy’s rules for more than 70 years. The next president of the United States is rethinking free trade.

In Washington, that tradition was taken for granted for so long that it rarely attracted much attention even in the business press, let alone dominated the politics pages of an entire election season. But in 2016, America’s faltering faith in free trade has become the most sensitive controversy in DC – never before have both main presidential candidates broken with the orthodoxy that globalisation is always good for Americans.

The proposed Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), between 12 countries around the Pacific rim, excluding China, suddenlyfaces a wall of political opposition among lawmakers who had, not long ago, nearly set the giant deal in stone. Parallel negotiations between the US and Europe, known as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), are suddenly even more behind: hamstrung by similar opposition as well as complications created by Britain’s vote to leave the European Union.

The White House has refused to give up, however, as it weighs the stakes of a system of multilateral deals largely invented by the US after the second world war. Before he left for his summer vacation, Obamapromised one last attempt to ratify TPP in the lame-duck session of Congress before he leaves office.

“We are part of a global economy. We’re not reversing that,” Obama said in a press conference earlier this month. When he returns to the White House on Sunday, salvaging TPP is near the top of his remaining agenda, with 30 events planned around the county to help persuade wavering lawmakers.

The problem is that over the years the interest of American corporations and the interests of Americans have diverged Edward Alden, Council on Foreign Relations

His would-be successor had a very different message at a manufacturing facility in suburban Detroit earlier this month. In a facility where work is being done on a rocket for a future Nasa mission to Mars, Clinton rejected much of TPP’s globalist philosophy.



“It’s true that too often, past trade deals have been sold to the American people with rosy scenarios that did not pan out,” Clinton told about 500 union workers and supporters. “Those promises now ring hollow.

“I will stop any trade deal that kills jobs or holds down wages – including the Trans-Pacific Partnership,” she said. “I oppose it now, I’ll oppose it after the election, and I’ll oppose it as president.”

The speech marked a dramatic shift for Clinton, who long supported the agreement and helped orchestrate negotiations as Obama’s first secretary of state. She has made another awkward reversal on the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), negotiated by George HW Bush and enacted in the 1990s by her husband, former president Bill Clinton.

Clinton on the TPP: ‘I oppose it now, I’ll oppose it after the election, and I’ll oppose it as president.’ Photograph: Picture-Alliance/Barcroft Images

More Republicans than Democrats supported that deal and TPP, but members of both parties are abandoning free trade at the sight of populist anger. The next president will face two battles: one at home for the soul of their party, and one abroad for the whole world’s post-war economic system.

“It’s a potentially very dangerous inflection point,” said Edward Alden, a leading trade expert at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.

Some suggest a “bicycle theory” of trade deals: that the international bandwagon has to keep rolling forward or else it all wobbles and falls down. But for Alden it is more about the alternative challenge posed by China, which is seeking its own deal with the TPP participants if the US cannot fulfill its promise.

“It’s about the architecture going forward,” says Alden. “China would like to see a very different set of trade rules. If TPP fails, the rest of the countries in Asia will have no choice but to go in the direction that China wants to move. The irony of it all is that opposing TPP will probably help China most.”

For the White House, this is the biggest reason to keep battling for TPP. If China seizes control of the Asian trade agenda, then it could quickly assert political and security dominance over the region and leave Obama’s “pivot” toward the region in tatters.

But few insiders think Clinton or congressional Republicans, much less Trump, will drop their opposition. “The idea that we are going to sacrifice manufacturing jobs to suit some esoteric foreign policy goal is just really not going to fly,” one senior DC lobbyist said.

Even the fabled influence of corporate America may not be enough to swing the argument, as illustrated by the scene of Clinton’s speech, Detroit.

“We export $140bn of finished vehicles and parts. We have supported every trade agreement in history, but we remain sceptical of this one,” said Matt Blunt, president of the American Automotive Policy Council and a former governor of Missouri.

Among the three big members, Ford openly opposes TPP because it fears the deal does nothing to stop Japan manipulating its currency at the expense of US rivals. But even General Motors and Fiat Chrysler have refused to come out swinging for a deal that would, in theory, open up important new markets in Vietnam and Malaysia.

For many US businessmen, the lack of political support for trade is perplexing, even in rust belt states where the most is at stake.

Given that the economy is kind of coming back right now, I just didn’t understand why trade was so prominent this race David Lawrence, vice-president, AlphaUSA

“Given that the economy is kind of coming back right now, something that is so key to the economy [as trade], I just didn’t understand why it was so prominent this race, and not some other issue,” said David Lawrence, vice-president of AlphaUSA, a fastener manufacturer based in suburban Detroit.

Alpha opened in Detroit nearly six decades ago, later moving to the suburbs. Lawrence, 49, has been with the company for a quarter-century. With 170 employees, Alpha presents a model example of the push-and-pull dynamics the debate over trade presents.

“Certainly, as we’ve seen it applied in the automotive area, moving operations to Mexico is certainly a lot less expensive for assembly plants, because labor is less expensive,” Lawrence said. “We’ve certainly seen our customers moving a lot of assembly operations south of the border over the last 25 years,” he added. “A lot of pressure has been coming from our customers to also move our operations to south of the border, to Mexico.”

But Lawrence said the idea that Mexico is an oasis for cheap manufacturing isn’t necessarily true. His company makes small parts, meaning material costs are higher than labor, he said: “So there very often is a case that buying the material in the US is actually less expensive.”

Still, the company has edicts from some of its customers to use locally sourced suppliers. As jobs have moved south of the border, following Nafta’s implementation, that has become more of a challenge, he said.

“We’re out to make a successful company,” he said. “But I think we also have an obligation to our community – to build that community, to create jobs for that community – and it makes it difficult.”

Trump’s anti-free trade rhetoric, said one Michigan businessman, is the ‘only thing I see in him that makes any sense’. Photograph: Gerald Herbert/AP

Nathan Semple, general manager of Drake Enterprises in Clinton Township, an auto parts manufacturer, also stresses how competitive the market became for work, post-Nafta.

“Before that era, it was a hell of a lot easier, in terms of getting work,” Semple, 31, said. “Since trade has basically outsourced and all that – everything is so tight. There’s no margins for anything, it’s like – basically you’re lucky to make 10% on stuff.”

The competitive nature of business under free trade still rattles his father and grandfather, who launched the company over five decades ago. “They still don’t understand,” Semple said. “How could they do this or this? We used to write on a bar napkin the price, and whoever the highest was, we’d submit it and get the work.”

The trade debate has particularly resonated in Michigan’s Macomb County, which produced the band of “Reagan Democrats” who helped propel the former Republican president to victory, and whom Trump has promised to reinvigorate.

Kurt Larson, 66, a retired auto worker who lives in Macomb County’s seat, Mount Clemens, recalled living in Arizona and how his father used to work for Motorola and witnessed first-hand the effect of jobs moving out of the US. “He would go to other countries,” Larson said, “they would build factories and get people to assemble semiconductors for 30 cents an hour.” And as trade deals came into place, the trend continued.

“I never want to see jobs that Americans do go overseas or abroad,” he said. “That’s counterproductive to our country.”

Walking along the quiet streets of downtown Mount Clemens, Dwayne Johnson, a construction worker who lives in the city of Dearborn, said he believes re-negotiating new trade deals is a “great idea”.

“It depends on whether we’re making money or how good the trade [agreement] is for the United States,” said the 57-year-old. “What I mean by that is, they’re taking all the jobs from over here and they’re putting them in other countries,” he added. “It don’t seem like we’re making money off it.”

Though Johnson said he supports Clinton over Trump – “I can’t see myself voting for him” – he said the Republican nominee’s relentless anti-trade rhetoric, elevating it to a major issue in the race, is the “only thing I see in him that makes any sense”. “If he [does] lose the election, he did offer something,” he said.

Lawrence, the chief administrative officer at AlphaUSA, agreed there was some truth to the feeling that trade deals had contributed to the decline in the quality of life in the US, particularly for the middle class.

“A lot of these workers have seen jobs leave this country and go to other countries,” he said. “And we’ve certainly seen that in the automotive marketplace.”

But trade has its advantages, Lawrence said, and no deal should be viewed as “good” or “bad” alone.

“Trade agreements happen not just so we can find the lowest cost to produce our products,” he said, noting that deals also create customers for American companies and open access to foreign resources.

To Lawrence, deals are made in the details: “It’s how we write them – and how do we come to the table with those other countries, take a leadership position, and make something that works for everyone. And that’s not easy, but it’s certainly possible.”

For politicians back in Washington, the trick will be to convince voters that deals can be in their interests.

“The problem is that over the years the interest of American corporations and the interests of Americans have diverged,” Alden, of the Council on Foreign Relations, said. “One of the mistakes is that corporate American has just said: ‘If it’s good for us, it’s good for America,’ and the approach needs to be more sophisticated than that. They need to show how it will help workers, too.”