The Guardian view on the Trans-Pacific Partnership: not a good deal | Editorial
In tone and substance Donald Trump is a divider, not a unifier. His grating bombast at last Friday's inauguration presaged a few days of overbearing, preening speeches that have alienated sceptics and enthralled supporters. The new US president is intent on pressing the buttons of his electoral base by peddling crude nationalism. He's not building bridges, but walls. Such sentiments lace President Trump's pronouncements on trade in which he - and his advisers - appear to hold pungent views, infused with a distinctly late-19th-century scent of economic nationalist politics. It's often forgotten that the Republican party discarded what remained of its anti-slavery and free-trade roots to become the party of protectionism in the 1880s. But not by Mr Trump. Like his predecessors of yesteryear the president views the world as being at perpetual war - whether economically with other nations or militarily with "radical Islam" - and espouses a doctrine that combines protectionism with coercive foreign market expansion to secure regionalised economic integration.
Yet on one narrow issue, President Trump is right. Withdrawing the United States from the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership is a good move. Conventional thinking is that trade allows nations to gain by doing what they do best and importing the rest. However, recent decades of US-championed globalisation have left a country with record weak productivity and ballooning wealth inequalities, with one in eight working-age men outside the labour force. President Trump stokes and taps this rage at the machine. Barack Obama did make efforts to make elements of trade justice - such as fairer labour and environmental rights - part of the Asian trade pact. But this was undone in the TPP by giving the right to corporates to sue often poorly financed governments in private international tribunals when they believe government regulations, including environmental ones, contravene the pact's terms.
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