In 2015, Donald Trump was unequivocal in describing his thoughts on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP.
“The Trans-Pacific Partnership is an attack on America’s business,” he tweeted at the time. “This is a bad deal.”
Trump went on to repeat the sentiment many times on the campaign trail. Soon after he landed in the White House, he issued a memo calling for the United States to permanently withdraw from the landmark trade agreement, signed by his predecessor less than a year before Trump took office, and which carries a number of mechanisms intended to make trade between its 12 signatories easier and more economically beneficial. (Trump argues that it destroys American jobs.)
The remaining countries have since agreed to revive the partnership without the U.S.
So where does that leave global trade? Are multilateral agreements dead?
“I don’t think so,” said former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker at the 2017 Fortune Global Forum in Guangzhou, China. “I think there’s a yearning for multilateralism.”
The TPP helped “knit together 40% of world’s GDP,” she added. It helped shape trade in Asia, a place where much of the economic action in the 21st century is expected to take place. President Trump may prefer bilateral agreements because they give the U.S. more power in that negotiation, Pritzker said, but America’s move away from multilateralism “leaves a void that allows for the lowering of standards in the region.”
Andrew Robb, the former Australian minister for trade and investment, agreed.
“The most destabilizing influence in the region is the fact that the United States pulled out of TPP,” he told Fortune’s Nina Easton before a room of executives. “The United States said for years that this is a demonstration of its commitment to the region…the small countries in Asia feel that no one has got their back. They like the balance of two big powerful groups.”
The U.S. under Trump has an obsession with containing China, Robb added with a tinge of frustration. It’s the wrong approach.
“The world is going to change…and the U.S. better get used to it,” he said. “We need to find ways to share power in the years ahead and do so in a peaceful, stable matter.”
Zhang Xiaoqiang, CEO of the China Center for International Economic Exchanges, extolled regional cooperation on top of bilateral agreements. Speaking through a translator, he said that China and the U.S. should continue to work together on global trade—particularly as China becomes the world’s biggest trade partner. In the meantime, China won’t hesitate to forge regional agreements in Asia.