At the end of January, Donald Trump signed an executive order to withdraw the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The TPP, a multinational trade agreement (similar to the European Union [EU]) that included the United States as well as Japan, Malaysia, Vietnam, Brunei, Australia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Canada, Mexico, and Chile, was finalized and agreed upon during Barack Obama’s presidency, but it had yet to be ratified. Now with the U.S. officially out of the deal, what’s next?

Will the TPP be finalized without the U.S.?No, at least not in its current state. Part of the deal was that at least six countries that make up 85 percent of the entire TPP group’s economic output would have to ratify the deal before it could actually go into effect. Because the U.S. economy is so huge, no other six countries can reach that 85 percent without it.

So what will the other 11 countries do next?Without the TPP, the other 11 countries aren’t completely dead in the water, but they do need to pivot — and they’ll likely pivot to China. “Many countries in Asia have publicly said they urgently need a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) to continue to grow their exports,” Timothy Barnes, author and president of Asia Pacific Consulting, tells Teen Vogue. Now that the TPP no longer appears to be an option, Barnes sees those countries as taking two routes. One is negotiating bilateral trade agreements, which Barnes says Japan has already started doing with India and Canada. The other is entering into a multilateral trade agreement, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), something that’s already in the works and began as an ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) agreement that Barnes says China has now taken the lead in. The RCEP includes 10 ASEAN countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar [Burma], and Vietnam), as well as Australia, China, India, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea.

“China will write a big trade deal with the rest of the region, and they will sign,” Tyler Cowen, author and Holbert L. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University, in Virginia, tells Teen Vogue. “They’re starting on it already."

Why is China such a big deal in all of this?One of the biggest arguments in support of the TPP was that it would strengthen the United States’ ties with the fast-growing Asian Pacific region and help the U.S. remain economically competitive with China. “When more than 95 percent of our potential customers live outside our borders, we can’t let countries like China write the rules of the global economy,” President Obama wrote in a statement on the TPP in 2015. Now that America is out of the picture, China has the chance to do just that.

“Our trade competitors like China are forging massive regional trade agreements,” Barnes says. “Time will tell, but my assumption is that China will continue to open its doors to global trade. And while America starts to close its doors and focus on simple bilateral agreements, the power of global trade will surely move toward China.”

How will this affect America?In the short term, both Cowen and Barnes note, the U.S. economy won’t really suffer. Some industries, like professional services and agriculture and food, may see a monetary increase in exports, while others, like manufacturing and electronic equipment, might see a loss. “It’s a mixed bag, [but] it is strongly believed that the U.S. economy would grow with an increase in annual GDP of $42.7 billion by 2032,” Barnes says, citing a U.S. International Trade Commission report.