That's Not How It's Supposed to Work. The Great Trump Giveaway.

Republican stalwart, Kevin Phillips, in his 2005 book, "American Theocracy," explores the dynamics of how a globally dominant empire essentially empowers its successor's ascendancy.  Phillips notes that, at each succession in recent centuries, the dominant power reaches a point where it gives up the engine of its greatness, industry, and shifts to a FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) economy, while it invests its wealth and transfers its industrial base to its successor. He describes it as a country using its wealth to grow its rival's economy.

Enter Donald Trump. The Bloat had no sooner parked his backside behind the Resolute desk when he took pen in hand and cancelled the controversial, Trans Pacific Partnership. Most people were either wildly in favour of the move or at least partially pleased. A few weren't at all pleased. That's because the TPP was a globalized trade deal but it was also a geopolitical pact to anchor American hegemony in Asia Pacific. It can be said that killing off the TPP was the greatest gift an American president ever handed China.


The TPP was envisioned by former U.S. President Barack Obama as the primary tool with which the Washington would retain the strategic initiative to lead in the Pacific region. In many ways, it was more than a trade deal; it was a key strategic maneuver. Clyde Prestowitz, founder and president of the Economic Strategy Institute, said that the essence of the TPP is “‘geopolitics’: that many of our friends in Asia were feeling neglected in America, and that it was being pushed aside in the region by China. Without a sign of American strength in the area, China might step into the vacuum.” Indeed, Obama often spoke of the TPP as a tool that will prevent China from writing the rules of trade in the near future. However, Donald Trump announced that the United States would withdraw from the TPP on his first day in the White House, effectively creating a leadership vacuum in the Pacific region — including Latin America.

The Pacific Alliance, a free-trading group comprising of Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru, lost no time in replacing the TPP. In mid-March, ministers and high-level representatives from nations that have signed on to the TPP, as well as China, Colombia, and South Korea, met for the first time since the United States’ withdrawal from the trade accord. According to Heraldo Muñoz, Chile’s foreign Minister, the signal from Viña del Mar, where the meeting took place, was clear: with or without the U.S., “multilateral trade and Pacific integration [is] alive and kicking.”

So as the United States withdraws from Pacific trade leadership, countries are turning to China. Peru’s president, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, made his first foreign trip last year to China, not Washington. This is hardly surprising since China is now Peru’s number one trading partner. It is also not surprising, then, that on March 23, Peru was admitted as one of 13 new members of the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. Whatever the United States intentions, countries like Peru are drifting further into China’s orbit.

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Chinese companies are busy embarking on new projects in South America. Shandong Gold, a state-backed Chinese company, recently agreed to pay almost $1 billion for half of Barrick Gold’s Veladero mine in Argentina. The Veladero mine is expected to produce as much as 830,000 ounces of gold this year, making this a major victory for China’s economy.

Even politically, the United States seems to flirt with avoiding leadership, an alarming development from the putative leader of the free world. The Trump administration informed the Washington, D.C.-based Inter-American Human Rights Commission that it would not participate in three hearings on March 21 about Trump’s executive orders on immigration, as part of a review of human rights cases in countries across the hemisphere. The highly unusual step of boycotting several sessions was a bad mistake that will weaken U.S. efforts to condemn Cuba, Ecuador, and other systematic human rights abusers.

The ground that Trump has given away, the influence and hegemony thrown out with the garbage, probably won't be coming back. What incentive would China possibly have to give back Trump's gifts? Asia, Africa, even America's back yard, South America, have gone or are going over to China's side. Aircraft carriers won't woo them back.