The US President-Elect Donald Trump’s policy outlines that his administration will withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) within his first 100 days in the Oval Office, and this should ring alarm bells in India. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has already warned that the US pullout will make the deal meaningless. It appears that Abe’s meeting with the President-Elect at the Trump Tower last week did not have the desired outcome.
The TPP, a 12-nation trade pact aiming to liberalise the flow of goods among countries in the Pacific Rim, was intended to challenge Chinese dominance in the region. The partnership, a product of more than seven years of negotiations, was considered a key achievement of the Obama administration. The end of the TPP would also mean an end to any hope for a US pivot in Asia — a sheet anchor for US-India-Japan security cooperation to confront China. It was constituted to resist Chinese growing power in the Pacific and Indian Ocean. In January 2012, US President Barack Obama unveiled a strategic plan in the Pentagon, designed to articulate US defense priorities for the coming decade, where the underlying premise was widely described as a US “pivot” toward rebalancing Asia.
The plan observed that the United States would invest in a “long-term strategic partnership” where India was to serve as a “regional economic anchor and provider of security in the broader Indian Ocean region.” But with the US walking away from the TPP, there will be a cascading effect on its pivotal role, leaving the Asia-Pacific ground open to China. The move could give Beijing - which backs the alternative Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP)— an opportunity to forge ahead with its own trade deals, thereby filling a vacuum left by any American withdrawal.
RCEP brings together the 10 members of the Southeast Asian grouping ASEAN plus China, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, but notably excludes the US. Hit by slow down and glut, China is trying to overcome its economic
difficulties by resorting to geo-politics. Little more than a week after Donald Trump’s victory, Chinese president Xi Jinping set off for Latin America — his third since 2013 — clutching a sheaf of trade deals.
Also, the strengthening of the China-Pakistan alignment in the last decade is a reaction to the rise of India. In the new environment, rather heavily depending on the US, India needs to anchor on its own a multilateral security architecture wherein all the Asian powers can work together and cooperate on vital economic and political issues for achieving their common interests. It also calls for a thorough review, if not the rest of India’s Act East policy.
