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Compelling evidence just appeared that the Obama administration is conceding that many critics are right to call its Pacific Rim trade deal is a nothing-burger economically – at best. It came in the form of U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman’s official comment on the new, Congressionally mandated U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC) projection of the deal’s economic effects.

The USITC did a good enough job pouring cold water on the notion that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) would be a major boon for the American economy. As has been widely reported, the Commission forecasts that the impact on the nation’s growth and real incomes is statistically insignificant.

These findings logically challenge critics’ descriptions of the deal as disastrous. But at the same time, the USITC assumes full compliance with the TPP’s terms by the eleven non-U.S. signatories. As I’ve explained, even if Washington performed a dramatic about-face and treated trade monitoring and enforcement as a priority, logistical and political barriers mock the belief that the United States can hold its TPP partners’ feet to the fire.

Indeed partly because its methodology can’t adequately take such problems into account, the USITC has a long and sorry track record of greatly understating the net harm to the American economy from new trade agreements.

But Ambassador Froman’s strategy for handling the USITC report strongly indicates that President Obama has decided to gloss over the claim that his aides did a great job at the TPP talks. For the U.S. Trade Representative evidently has decided to change the subject.

Froman did make some token stabs at portraying the TPP’s terms as economic winners for Americans. For example, he took the time-honored official Washington tack of touting export projections while ignoring predictions for imports (which globally would be greater according to the USITC) and thus the net economic impact of trade flows.

Yet Froman quickly exited this specifics-oriented economic debate and pointedly contended that “What cannot be quantified in this study or any other is the cost to American leadership if we fail to pass TPP and allow China to carve up the Asia-Pacific through their own trade agreement.”  

Unfortunately for him and the president, this position puts them on no stronger ground. On the one hand, after all, Froman is implicitly conceding that any set of TPP provisions to which the United States agrees is better than none because simply signing the treaty creates an American seat at the Asia-Pacific rule-writing table. On the other hand, as I’ve repeatedly noted, expectations that such American participation will create even longer-term benefits is laughable for at least four main reasons.

First, most of America’s main regional allies – and most major TPP signatories – are already taking part in those Chinese initiatives that Froman describes as so hostile to American interests. These initiatives include not only China’s new Asia infrastructure bank, but its Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership – its explicit counterpart trade agreement.

Second, the United States itself has given its blessing to another Chinese-backed regional trade scheme – a proposed Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific.

Third, these Chinese measures have attracted such regional support largely because so many East Asian countries in particular (as opposed to TPP’s Western Hemisphere members) pursue the kinds of Chinese-style trade and broader economic policies that the administration has long noted have undercut U.S. Domestic economic interests. Regardless of the piece of paper they have signed, the last thing these neo-mercantilist powers want to see is an enforceable set of “rules for trade” that reflect America’s more free-market-oriented values and practices.

Fourth, because U.S. and Asian definitions of acceptable and unacceptable economic behavior contrast so strikingly, even sitting at the TPP table can’t possibly guarantee pro-American results – unless the TPP’s dispute-resolution mechanism breaks with all recent precedents and awards outsized authority to the United States, as opposed to operating on consensual, or one-country, one-vote, principles.

Not that Froman or the rest of the administration are running out of arguments yet. They could refocus the debate on the national security claim that TPP is essential for preserving and/or strengthening America’s geopolitical position in the Asia-Pacific region, especially as China’s power and influence surge (even though this administration has done little at most to stem the flow of defense-related technology and valuable economic wherewithal to that same China). They could also warn that President Obama’s international credibility will be undercut if TPP is rejected (even though his presidency is nearly over).

Wouldn’t it be much better if Mr. Obama and his aides just threw in the towel, admitted that despite decades of experience, neither Democratic nor Republican administration’s have figured out how to negotiate trade agreements that work for America on net, and if the next president spent time and resources developing a learning curve instead?

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