Article content continued

Photo by Getty Images

The pact opens up trade in services on the basis of equal treatment. It cuts the costs of customs clearance, rules of origin and compliance to a minor friction. Once Vietnam, Malaysia, Peru, Chile and Brunei have ratified the treaty it will cover 13.5 per cent of global GDP, bigger than the EU’s post-Brexit market and a faster-growing region of the global economy.

South Korea, Thailand, Taiwan, Indonesia and Colombia have all expressed interest in joining. So has the U.K., despite being in the Atlantic. It promises to become the world’s biggest free trade zone in short order, and perhaps the nucleus of a new global order.

The partnership – earlier known as the TPP – was originally a tool of U.S. foreign policy. It was to anchor the “Asian pivot” and underpin the US system of military and diplomatic alliances around the Pacific Rim.

In the words of one former U.S. defence secretary it was worth more to American power than another aircraft carrier battle group. Above all, it was a way to “contain” the hegemonic reflexes of China.

Instead it is the U.S. that has contained itself. President Donald Trump pulled the country out of the talks within days of taking office in January 2017, deeming it a “potential disaster” for American workers. Critics say it will go down as the greatest strategic blunder of his presidency.

The White House assumed that the TPP would wither on the vine without U.S. impetus. Instead, long-standing U.S. allies across the Pacific have brushed off pressure from Washington and forged ahead regardless with what is now known as the “anti-Trump pact.”

America is the biggest loser,” says the Peterson Institute in Washington. The fall in food tariffs under the CPTPP means that U.S. farmers will be undercut by exporters from Australia, Canada, and New Zealand in the lucrative Japanese market.