At Seattle’s APEC summit this month, TPP should be a priority

This month, Seattle welcomes the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation to our shores. It’s a chance for local business leaders to meet with senior officials from Pacific Rim economies and advance the policy priorities that rest closest to their hearts.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership ought to be among them.

Seattle will host APEC’s third round of senior officials’ and ministerial meetings for the year, beginning Saturday. This marks the third year the U.S. has hosted APEC, an economic forum promoting free trade in the Indo-Pacific region.

The first host year was 1993, when President Bill Clinton invited APEC leaders, including Chinese President Jiang Zemin, to Blake Island. The U.S. had seen Japan’s dark horse economy become the world’s second largest by 1978. That same year, China began economic reforms under Deng Xiaoping and was soon the world’s fastest-growing major economy.

In 2011, President Barack Obama welcomed APEC members to Honolulu. The year before, China had surpassed Japan to become the world’s second-largest economy, and the TPP was at the center of Obama’s strategic pivot to Asia.

The agreement included provisions for tariff cuts, enhanced market access and intellectual property protection. It also would have allowed workers to form unions, prohibited child labor and strengthened environmental protections.

In Washington state, it was estimated the agricultural benefits alone would have added more than 1,350 jobs.

By 2016, the TPP was set to become the world’s largest trade deal, with member economies comprising 40% of the world’s GDP, according to U.S. International Trade Commission data. The following year, with some cross-aisle political support, President Donald Trump walked away from the deal, saying he wanted to take China to task for its trade-distorting policies.

But, arguably, the TPP coalition was the best tool he had with which to do so.

Since then, the TPP has moved on without the U.S. — under Japan’s leadership. Renamed the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, the CPTPP has been stripped of many provisions the U.S. fought to include, such as intellectual property protections.

Worse, while our leadership failed to realize the deal’s profound potential, China did not. Beijing quickly formed its own version of the TPP, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which entered into force in 2022 and is now the largest trade agreement in the world.

President Joe Biden has responded with the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, but this effort lacks the kind of tariff cuts provided by either of the efforts by Japan or Beijing, making it an unattractive alternative.

This Seattle summit is a chance for the city’s business leaders to engage ministers from across the Asia-Pacific region and table discussion topics ahead of the leaders’ summit in San Francisco this November. It’s also a chance to recall the wisdom behind the first Seattle summit.

Namely, that the impact of Asian economies is headed our way like a freight train and we can either choose to be in the engine room or on the tracks.