Scott Bessent Wants to Resurrect the Trans-Pacific Partnership. But Does Donald Trump? No.
For Donald Trump to want to resurrect the TPP—to recognize he made a huge mistake back in January 2017—would be possible only if Donald Trump actually had ideas and preferences about policies...
For Donald Trump to want to resurrect the TPP—to recognize he made a huge mistake back in January 2017—would be possible only if Donald Trump actually had ideas and preferences about policies, which he does not. All he has are “instincts”. Now should I sent this in to Project Syndicate? Or is it just too intemperate a rant, reflective of nothing but my badly unbalanced mental state these days?
Eight years and three months after Donald Trump blew up the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and so unilaterally disarmed the United States in the runup to his launching his trade war against China, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent claims (a) he has the baton from Donald Trump to use the threat of tariffs to negotiate trade deals, and (b) his first priority is to renegotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and then have its members negotiate as a group vis-a-vis the Great Central Country that is China. Chris Anstey notices:
Chris Anstey: Bessent Has a ‘Grand Encirclement’ Plan for China <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-04-12/bessent-has-a-grand-encirclement-plan-for-china-bloomberg-new-economy>: ‘US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent emerged from this week’s market ructions as a perhaps-unexpected lead trade negotiator, offering a potential scenario for the coming months: US deals with longstanding partners that put pressure on China….US friends. At the end of the day, the Trump administration can probably reach an agreement with them. “Then we can approach China as a group,” he said…. Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and India… neighbors of China…. with which the US could work… a “grand encirclement” strategy. If this tactic sounds familiar, that’s because it is. The Obama administration’s big trade idea was using the Trans-Pacific Partnership to assemble a coalition of Pacific Rim nations that would increasingly be tied to the US, and not drift into China’s orbit. Trump abandoned the TPP shortly after first taking office in January 2017…
Not having blown up the TPP would have been the best thing. The Obama team knew what it was redoing in pursuing a strategy to rebalance the U.S.-China trade relationship. But, having blown up the TPP in the past, it would indeed be the best thing to resurrect it.
But that is not possible.
First of all, none of the other potential members believe that Trump is a credible negotiating partner. Bessent wants to work with “Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and India”. They will be very happy to say they are working with the U.S. Their leaders will even come to Mar-a-Lago, and say nice words about Trump. But they all know that there is no point in conceding anything to Trump because doing so will get them the exactly zero credit with Trump that Mexico and Canada got from playing ball with Trump and doing him the favor of transforming what he said was the worst into the very best of trade agreements by renegotiating NAFTA into the USMCA agreement.
Second, Bessent is, to put it bluntly, lying.
He does not have a baton.
There is no baton.
Trump makes decisions minute to minute based on “instincts”. If Bessent manages to come up with something and bring it to Trump as a moment when Trump’s instincts say “yes”, Trump will take credit for it. If Bessent comes up with nothing, or if what he brings to Trump is not to Trump’s instinctive liking at that particular moment, Trump will disavow Bessent for freelancing.
Such is life at the court of the chaos-monkey king.
Larry Summers attempts some sanewashing of what is going on:
Larry Summers: ‘"Turn[ing] the clock back to where it was before the Second World War… [is] enormously costly for the United States and for the world economy…. We're going to make very important choices…. Mak[ing] them wisely… [is] backing off of the policies that have been announced….. The main shoe that will or will not drop is the next thing the president says…. The sole preöccupation that I would have if I were in the government is with what the president was saying…. There are a very limited number of issues and it has to be immensely significant that make it the right and moral thing for a senior official to resign…. The president is entitled to have advisors who believe in his policies…. Individuals are entitled to follow their conscience…
Larry, there are no policies. Nothing, at least, that we would call policy, with staffwork and modeling and analysis and scenarios and objectives and goals. In the back room there is, at most Kevin Hassett with a spreadsheet of one country name and two data columns, a couple of subordinates out of their depth, and the ability to make a chart. And in the front room there is Trump, wandering around, saying things, incurious, underbriefed, spouting bullshit, while the cameras roll.
This is, for Trump, operating normally. This is, for Trump, the way he acted on the set of The Apprentice. It is how he thinks he ought to act—it led to great success on The Apprentice, after all. But, afterwards, in the making of The Apprentice, there was a film editor. The film editor’s job was to take the raw footage and edit it down to episode length, and in the process impose on it a logic that it did not have. In the process of editing:
create out of whole cloth a plot with a beginning, a middle, and an end…
pick out short clips, invert their time of occurrence, and put them forward as foreshadowing…
create out of whole cloth narrative closure…
and a story in which contestants receive what they justly preserve and Trump is portrayed as decisive and effective…
But that was not the work of Donald Trump. It was the work of the film editor.
I find the contrast between Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan very instructive here.
Ronald Reagan had a governing philosophy: enormous confidence in the American people, in their entrepreneurship and enterprise but also in their good will and generosity; plus enormous suspicion of the policies and programs and bureaucracies built up under Democratic-Party ægis since 1933. Ronald Reagan knew he was the star. Plus he also had enormous confidence in himself as an actor: in his ability to memorize and say his lines, and play the part of president as well as Cæsar Augustus had played the part of Emperor in his day—to make people weep for Queen Hekuba of Troy, in spite of Hamlet’s good question “What’s Hekuba to him, or he to Hekuba,/That he should weep for her?”
But while Reagan had a philosophy, and knew he was the star, he did not think he was the boss. He also had immense confidence in the studio—the dense network of professionals from lighting technicians and makeup artists and sound editors through scriptwriters up to the director and producer—who were all there to make it possible for him to be effective as the star, and who did their jobs excellently and professionally so that he could do his. As with the studio in Reagan’s Hollywood days, so with the White House staff in Reagan’s presidenting days. When his confidence was justified—when he did have high-quality professionals in their places on the White House staff—results were quite good. When his confidence was not so justified—well, Colonel Oliver North made a thorough mess of Middle East policy vis-à-vis Iran, and David Stockman hollowed out Midwestern manufacturing to such an extent that it has never been able to stem still further decline.
But the White House today is not the set of The Apprentice. And there is no film editor.
There are, however, lots of people who want to be the film editor, to after the fact retcon some subset of Trump’s remarks, and then be able to look back and say: “See! This was always the coherent policy!” I, on economic policy, detect separate Bessent, Lutnick, Miran, Hassett, and Navarro factions. Plus there is Elon Musk outside the monkey cage, hoping to climb in, and then bring every single engineering graduate of the Indian Institutes of Technology here to the United States and enserf them with H1-B visas. These six factions agree on appallingly little, save that each of then once to be the retrospective film editor.
And Trump trusts none of them.
What should be done?
What should be done is for Mike Johnson and John Thune to actually care about the governance of the United States, and give Trump an ultimatum: Appoint regents for foreign policy and domestic policy and then give speeches saying the lines that they give you. Otherwise we will peel off a few of our members and you will have to deal with Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer as leaders of the Congress. For we have no confidence in your current “policy process”. If they are serious Trump, will knuckle under. He has, after all, stopped casually insulting Canada now that Mark Carney has given him a look. My vote for domestic-policy regent is Scott Bessent. Not, mind you, that I think he will do good in the job. But I do think he will do less harm than anyone else I can think of in the set of people Trump would be willing to choose for the job.
But that is not going to happen.
We, and the world, are in huge trouble.
Gotta wonder why you're "sanewashing" Ronald Reagan. Ollie North was nothing but a tool. After the Democratic House and the Republican Senate passed, and Reagan signed, legislation banning U.S. support for the Contras, Reagan told North it was his job to keep the Contras together, "body and soul." Reagan was as well the prime driver for the "Iran Connection", desperate to obtain the hostages, inquiring about their fate from his National Security Advisor every day. No aspect of the Iran Contra affair would have occurred without Reagan's constant pressure, overriding the explicit opposition of both Secretary of State Schultz and Secretary of Defense Weinberger, men whose judgment Reagan had enormous faith in.
Similarly, Stockman had nothing to do with the "collapse" of American manufacturing in the Midwest. As a youngish reporter, I sat in a congressional committee room in 1981 and heard Lynn Williams, head of the Steelworkers, beg for tariffs: "The South Korean mills are state of the art. We can't compete." The Carter administration had already deregulated trucking, the airlines, and the railroads in order to combat inflation, naturally weakening their respective unions as well. Stockman was a "power" in the Reagan admnistration for less than a year, but the administration's deep hostility to unions (remember the air traffic controllers?) lasted for eight. The heavily unionized Midwest was a product of the "natural" monopoly that American industry possessed immediately after WWII. After the monopoly ended, the bloated, inefficient companies and their unions fell by the wayside. I gues you could call that "creative destruction", which is not a lot of fun when you are the one being destructed.
I think the anti-democratic drive (call that a plan or an instinct) of Trump and plenty of his cronies needs to be better explored.
Unlike tariff policies, take a look at issues that I group into the destruction of civil liberties. He rarely flip-flops on those and is happy to flout the Courts.
All together, including his tariff flip-flopping, Trump seeks to create a society of domination and shares that vision with Musk and others. Curtailing trade and civil liberties fly in the face of liberalist society, which America has always been. Trump wishes to destroy our way of life any way he can.