And by not participating, the bad things the US (i.e. Hollywood) wanted don't end up in there. And the bad things other countries wanted won't apply in the US. And the treaties can't be used for domestic policy laundering in the US.
The problem with these deals is that free trade is generally good but these deals aren't free trade. They're not about eliminating restrictions, they're about imposing them. Which we can do perfectly well on our own via our democratically elected governments, if we want to, and not if we don't.
But trade discrimination in 2016 is different than it was in 1948, when the GATT made its debut, or even 1994, when NAFTA came into effect. The process of legislating national standards and regulations that can differ from global ones means that governments can block trade in ways the drafters of GATT could never have even imagined.
Those who believe in a rules-based global economy should cheer rather than condemn the fact that TPP runs thousands of pages. Its complexity reflects the fact that, like KORUS before it, the deal is going after high-hanging fruit. After all, the WTO has already picked the low-hanging fruit by disciplining most tariffs. [0]
0. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/08/0...
It also seems like a quite impractical protectionist method for any major country, because foreign competitors will suffer an inconvenience complying with the regulation, but in most cases that won't actually keep them out of the country. And then your country's domestic industry will suffer the same inconvenience exporting their product when they have to comply with the conflicting regulations in the other country.
Wasting resources like that is in the interest of no one, but because it's in the interest of no one, you don't need an international agreement about it, you only need the industry to each go to their respective governments with the same proposed standards and argue that they should each adopt the international industry standards because it will make it easier to export domestic products.
And why would a country that didn't agree to that be willing to sign the trade agreement? (If your answer is "some kind of extrademocratic quid pro quo" then you've discovered why these agreements are much hated.)
That's part of the reason people oppose the DAPL and other pipelines, because US (and Canadian) communities are taking on the environmental risks of economic arrangements that benefit the wealthy (Trump was invested in DAPL) and China, with a few pipeline jobs the crumbs to satiate the affected communities.
We were told by the Very Smart People that we had to invade Iraq, because otherwise the Islamists would consolidate control over the region. We invaded, and not only did we not prevent that outcome, we actually caused it.
I didn't even vote for Trump, but the one thing I'll side with him on is that I'm quite sick of being told that we have to take this or that self-destructive action for the sake of defeating the foreign-boogeyman-du-jour.
The people advocating invasion did so on the basis that their WMD program represented a threat to the world. They were obviously full of crap to anyone paying attention at the time.
>We were told by the Very Smart People we had to go into Vietnam, because otherwise Domino Theory assured that the Communists would take over the world. We lost Vietnam, and tens of thousands of lives, and nothing happened.
Please stop trying to dramatize reality. The truth is that withdrawing from a multilateral 'trade' deal has consequences, and those are worth analyzing.
>We were told by the Very Smart People that we had to invade Iraq, because otherwise the Islamists would consolidate control over the region. We invaded, and not only did we not prevent that outcome, we actually caused it.
I don't really understand what you're saying, to be honest - are you talking about the Iraq War, like the one that happened in '03? Do you think that's the reason that was cited, or the motivation of the administration?
>I didn't even vote for Trump, but the one thing I'll side with him on is that I'm quite sick of being told that we have to take this or that self-destructive action for the sake of defeating the foreign-boogeyman-du-jour.
Funnily enough, Trump gave up a great piece of leverage and instead needs to resort to threats ('China wont go into the north china sea', recognizing Taiwan). So the net result in the change in relations is much less effective and much riskier leverage.
This is incorrect. The primary justification for the 2003 invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein's regime had WMDs, and that his WMD programs were a growing threat to the region and the world. The majority of Americans thought that invading Iraq would increase the terror threat to the US.[1]
1. In a CBS/NYTimes poll, 62% of those polled said that if the US took military action vs. Iraq, the threat of terror would increase. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/poll-talk-first-fight-later/
> We invaded, and not only did we not prevent that outcome, we actually caused it.
Well yeah, who thinks you bring peace with war? There are ways we could have taken over Iraq peacefully, such as making it a protectorate and giving everyone health care (which would have been far cheaper than the war).
In fact, what you're saying is the second half of the traditional "We have to do something, and this is something, so we have to do this." fallacy. "Well, if bombing the the ungrateful fuckers didn't make them love us we're out of here."
No, you've got a lot of shit to fix before you get to quit.
The argument is that a land invasion would have resulted in far more than the 129,000 people killed by the two bombs.
Later it emerged that it was actually the Soviet delcaration of war on the 8th August that was the deciding factor for surrender; the Japanese had stocked around 10,000 aircraft in Manchuria which were now under threat and they couldn't fight a two-front war.
Yes, the two bombs ultimately saved untold thousands lives but that was more accidental than deliberate.
Japanese leadership assumed they could negotiate with the Russians, and therefore still had an out. When this avenue was closed, the Japanese were forced to face the fact that they had lost.
It's somewhat ironic that the Russian army put forth the vast majority of effort and lives that defeated the Germans, yet it was America that reached Berlin first, resulting in Nazi surrender. This was reciprocated in the Pacific theater by the Americans expending the lions share of the effort and lives, yet it was the Russians that forced Japanese surrender.
Although, this is all theory by historians. It still stands to reason that in the moment, the Americans speculated that the use of nuclear weapons would end the war. After all, Truman issued an ultimatim that essentially spelled out what would and did happen if the Japanese did not surrender.
Um, no.
Emperor of Japan directly cited "a new powerful weapon" in a surrender address.
> the Japanese had stocked around 10,000 aircraft in Manchuria
Sources? Why Japan had to stock that number of aircraft so far away from the planned invasion points?