Members of an 11-nation Asia-Pacific trade pact said Friday they opposed any renegotiation of the deal to accommodate the U.S. should it decide to rejoin at a later date.
Ministers from Japan, Australia and Malaysia welcomed President Donald Trump directing officials to explore returning to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a pact he withdrew from shortly after coming to office. But they also cautioned against making any significant changes.
"We welcome the U.S. coming back to the table but I don’t see any wholesale appetite for any material re-negotiation of the TPP-11,” Australia Trade Minister Steven Ciobo said Friday.
Toshimitsu Motegi, Japan’s minister in charge of TPP, also said it would be difficult to change the deal, calling it a "balanced one, like fine glassware." Malaysia’s International Trade and Industry Minister Mustapa Mohamed echoed these remarks, saying that renegotiation would "alter the balance of benefits for parties.”
Trump Tweet
In a Twitter post on Thursday night, Trump said the U.S. "would only join TPP if the deal were substantially better than the deal offered to Pres. Obama. We already have BILATERAL deals with six of the eleven nations in TPP, and are working to make a deal with the biggest of those nations, Japan, who has hit us hard on trade for years!"
In remarks on Thursday he also expressed optimism about a deal with China, a week after escalating tensions with his threat to impose tariffs on an additional $100 billion in Chinese products. He said the two countries ultimately may end up levying no new tariffs on each other.
“Now we’re really negotiating and I think they’re going to treat us really fairly,” Trump said during a White House meeting with Republican governors and lawmakers from farm states. “I think they want to.”
U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross later said the administration needs to see concrete actions from China to reach a deal.
The remarks were another conciliatory signal from the administration following tit-for-tat tariffs proposals from the world’s largest two economies that rattled markets. Trump also indicated that talks are progressing toward successful renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
The S&P 500 Index closed up 0.8 percent and the Dow Jones Industrial Average added almost 300 points, or 1.2 percent, as investors assessed the changing trade dynamics. Asian stocks climbed as equities in Japan and Australia advanced.
Trump withdrew the U.S. from the accord during his first week in office. The pact, which was conceived as a counterweight to China’s rising economic power in the region, had been negotiated under the Obama administration but never approved by Congress.
Senator Ben Sasse, Nebraska Republican who participated in a meeting with Trump on Thursday where he spoke about rejoining the deal, said: "He multiple times reaffirmed the point that TPP might be easier to join now."
The news drew a rebuke from opponents of the multilateral trade pact. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, head of the main trade union group, said on Twitter that TPP “was killed because it failed America’s workers and it should remain dead.”
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Democrat Senator Sherrod Brown, said he was “very open to a new TPP” as long as it had strong labor rights protections and currency provisions. “You’d need a whole renegotiation.”
The 11 remaining nations represent 13 percent of global output and include Japan and Canada. They finalized a revised version of the trade pact last month, renaming it the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership or CPTPP.
One of the White House officials said that while the president prefers negotiating bilateral trade deals, a multilateral deal with the TPP countries would counter Chinese competition and would be faster than negotiating one-on-one with each of the 11 other nations.
--With assistance from Debra Mao Steven T. Dennis Connor Cislo Toru Fujioka and Isabel Reynolds
To contact the reporters on this story: Justin Sink in Washington at jsink1@bloomberg.net, Margaret Talev in Washington at mtalev@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alex Wayne at awayne3@bloomberg.net, Malcolm Scott at mscott23@bloomberg.net, James Mayger, Andy Sharp
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