Russia, China, and Japan Fill the Trump Trade Gap

The dozen nations in the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade group took seven years to hammer out a deal. President-elect Donald Trump promises to take just one day to scrap it. His fiery anti-TPP, anti-Nafta, and anti-Chinese exports rhetoric creates opportunities for rival powers to promote their own trade agenda, says Hussain Rammal, senior lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney Business School. When it comes to global trade, he says, “there is a leadership vacuum.”

China is already moving to replace the U.S. as trade champion. “Despite its recent setbacks, globalization remains an irreversible trend of our times,” Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said on Nov. 3 at a meeting where he and counterparts from Russia and four Central Asian countries discussed the possibility of a free-trade area. China is in talks to form an Asian trading bloc, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), that would include Australia, India, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, and the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The latest round of negotiations is scheduled to take place from Dec. 2 through Dec. 10 near the Indonesian capital of Jakarta.