President Obama’s top trade adviser refused to give a timeline for submitting the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal to Congress, saying the focus now was on educating lawmakers and the public about the 12-nation deal with some of the country’s biggest Pacific Rim trading partners.
“It’s too early to tell,” U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman said in a teleconference with reporters when asked about a schedule for the TPP, but he warned that the U.S. risked missing out on a major opportunity to spur growth and set the rules for international competition if the agreement is rejected.
“The rest of the world is not standing still, our competitors are not standing still,” Mr. Froman said in the briefing, organized by the Council on Foreign Relations.
Mr. Froman did not address the rising resistance from Mr. Obama’s fellow Democrats, on display in this week’s presidential debate in which front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton and challenger Sen. Bernard Sanders of Vermont both sharply attacked the agreement. Labor unions, a key constituency for the party, are largely hostile to the TPP as well.
“It was just finally negotiated last week, and in looking at it, it didn’t meet my standards,” said Mrs. Clinton, who had repeatedly praised the pact as it was being negotiated before stepping down as Mr. Obama’s secretary of state in 2013. “My standards for more new, good jobs for Americans, for raising wages for Americans.”
Republican front-runner Donald Trump is also a harsh critic of the agreement, which includes Canada, Japan and nine other Pacific Rim trading nations.
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Analysts say the Obama administration faces a narrow window of opportunity in the coming months on Capitol Hill to obtain congressional agreement before the 2016 presidential election campaign takes over the political calendar.
Mr. Froman said he saw the TPP as a stepping-stone to freer trade and more multilateral agreements around the world. Right now, South Korea and China are not part of the TPP accord, although South Korean President Park Guen-hye said Thursday on a Washington visit that Seoul hopes to be part of the TPP bloc in time.
“The U.S. is a Pacific power, always has been, always will be,” Mr. Froman said, emphasizing that the TPP is a “part of the rebalancing strategy towards Asia.”
He said ratification of the treaty, which will require majority votes in both chambers of the Republican-dominated Congress, would send a strong message to Beijing, which is negotiating its own investment treaty with the United States but was left out of the TPP talks.
China will “have to live in a TPP world, where its neighbors are offering environmental standards, dispute settlement, stronger intellectual-property rights, protections against trade-secret theft, disciplines on state-owned enterprises and free and open Internet,” Mr. Froman said. “And that means China is going to have to up its game.”
Mrs. Clinton and other TPP critics have cited the failure of the agreement to deal with currency manipulation as a major reason for their opposition, saying it will allow U.S. rivals such as Japan to undercut American companies by lowering the value of their currency relative to the dollar.
Mr. Froman said there would not be any “side deals” to the main agreement submitted to Congress, but said the Treasury Department and finance officials in other TPP nations have agree to “consult about currency policies” as the trade deal goes into force.
If passed, the TPP would be the most ambitious trade agreement of Mr. Obama’s presidency, covering countries that account for nearly 40 percent of global gross domestic product.
• Meghan Bartlett can be reached at mbartlett@washingtontimes.com.
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