On his first day in office in 2017, President Donald Trump announced the United States’s (US) withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Given the pivotal US role in negotiating the 12-nation trade accord, pundits wasted little time in predicting the demise of the agreement. Four years on, TPP is alive and well. Even as heavyweights such as China, the United Kingdom and South Korea clamour to enter the mega trade deal, India and the US maintain their distance and risk being left out in the cold. Signed in 2016, TPP brought together the likes of the US, Japan, Canada, and Singapore under the banner of a single trade accord. Given that the original 12 founders accounted for close to 40% of global trade, TPP’s size was rightly seen as a game-changer. TPP, unlike its humbler cousin — the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) — also represented the sweeping economic ambitions of its architects.
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