If Trump is to be believed, TPP and perhaps NAFTA are dead. How vital is the U.S. to global trade? Indispensable! Or so the indispensable nation seems to think. The truth is that the weight that the U.S. economy brings to any table is unmatched. No one nation brings that kind of bargaining and purchasing power that the U.S. economy does when it comes to trade negotiations. However, the world economies have their lives to live and probably won’t sit around waiting for Americans to stop crying about the world that was and how they wish they could bring it back. So, unless the Japanese Prime Minister secured a secret assurance that the TPP will not be stopped should it pass in a lame duck session of congress, the rest of Asia should move on with the Trans Pacific Partnership agreement without the U.S. making their own pivot towards China.
The absence of the U.S. in Asia will leave a massive hole that Japan and China may look to fill which could potentially be more beneficial to both nations had the U.S. remained in the agreement. Japan would gain a bigger role in the region which would also increase its leverage should Trump revert to bilateral type of trade negotiations in the future. Japan would have a stronger position for those negotiations. It would also keep the TPP alive should America ever regain its now populist, isolationist, racist, and xenophobic infected mind and decide to join in at a later date. So what could go wrong if the U.S. goes full cave dweller? The world moves on realizes that life goes on with or without America.