There,
I’ve said it.
There
has been a lot of public doodling by the media and analysts around the progress,
impasses and, in the fevered imagination of Yomiuri Shimbun, “effective
agreement” at various stages in the TPP negotiations between the United States
and Japan. Now, I’m seeing reports that there will be no deal during Prime
Minister Abe’s visit to Washington.
And
that’s news?
Give
me a break. It’s not even about TPA. Look, no bilateral deal will be made
public until all the bilateral deals have been cut. To illustrate, let’s say
that Japan and the United States make a deal on beef that is more favorable to
the United States than the one that Australia got in their bilateral FTA with
Japan. That would displease the Australian government, who would want a similar
deal from Japan. But not only is that likely to induce the Japanese government to
demand a quid pro quo but would also displease U.S. and Japanese beef producers,
who would make new, mutually conflicting demands of their own. So any bilateral
deal on tariffs will have to be kept under wraps until all the chickens come
home to roost, as it were.
So
what was all the “negotiating” about? My guess is that it was a mixture of
sounding out the other side to figure where and what the real issues and the other
side’s priorities were, ironing out technical issues, establishing and
reinforcing relationships with the other side so that the endgame could proceed
expeditiously, and otherwise doing their best to minimize glitches along the
way. The rest, I would argue, was camouflage.
I
could, of course, be wrong. But I think that I’ve done a better reading of the
process so far than most. And I’m not worried that I’ll be proven wrong this
time either.
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