President Barack Obama looks out as he sits on stage as Attorney General Loretta Lynch speaks during her investiture ceremony at the Warner Theatre in Washington. (Source: AP) Critics have long predicted that President ’s policy to shift America’s focus toward Asia is doomed. The legislative battle over his trade agenda could prove the acid test.
Legislation to smooth the way for a free-trade pact with 11 other Asia-Pacific nations hit a wall in last week. A fresh vote in the House was set for Thursday to try to reverse that setback. Formidable obstacles remain— principally, opposition from Obama’s fellow Democrats who believe trade deals cost American jobs.
The Obama administration itself has always presented the Trans-Pacific Partnership as crucial to its “pivot” toward the increasingly prosperous Asian region, after a post-9/11 preoccupation with wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Officials have been at pains to point out the policy means more than ramping up America’s military presence to counter rising-power China.
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But the administration was slow off the blocks in the politically prickly task of getting congressional support for “fast track” authority for the president to negotiate trade pacts that lawmakers can approve or reject but not amend. That’s viewed as essential for winning eventual US ratification for TPP.
The upshot is the current logjam in Congress. Obama and his legislative allies — which in this case are mostly Republicans — were consulting Wednesday to find a way a way through it.
While plans were yet to be finalized, officials said the House could have a stand-alone vote on fast track on Thursday. A package of aid for workers who lose their jobs because of imports would become part of a separate bill. The two measures were originally combined into one, to sweeten the deal for union-backed Democrats, who voted against it anyway last Friday.
That political setback was greeted with anguish by Asia experts in Washington and former administration officials.
Larry Summers, a former director of the National Economic Council in the Obama White House, wrote that unless the trade legislation votes were successfully revisited, it would “doom” the TPP. “It would leave the grand strategy of rebalancing US foreign policy toward Asia with no meaningful nonmilitary component,” he said.
Obama, who was born in Hawaii and spent some of his childhood in Indonesia, has described himself as “America’s first Pacific President.” He took office believing that in no small measure, America’s future is tied to Asia’s, as the center of global economic growth has shifted eastward.
His grand strategy to elevate America’s profile in the region has been welcomed both in Washington and in Asia, where China’s assertive behavior in disputed maritime territories has unnerved its neighbors.
But skepticism has grown.
Preoccupation with crises in the Middle East, cuts to the US aid and defense budgets, and domestic political