Citing a supposed groundswell of support for rejoining the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), former U.S. Trade Representative Ambassador Robert Lighthizer recently argued that it would be a mistake for the United States to reenter the trade pact. The promising agreement with 11 other Pacific Rim countries was negotiated by the Obama Administration as the economic centerpiece of its “pivot to Asia” but then was unfortunately jettisoned by the Trump Administration as one of its first official acts in January 2017. The remaining TPP members moved forward with the agreement and renamed it the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). Former Ambassador Lighthizer argues that the agreement fails on both economic and geopolitical grounds. His claims do not withstand scrutiny.

First, on the economics: Ambassador Lighthizer recites a well-worn litany of zero-sum mercantilist complaints about the agreement: CPTPP/TPP membership would do nothing to boost the U.S. economy and would not do much to boost exports. That’s simply not true. In 2016, Cato’s analysis of the agreement found that, on net, TPP would have liberalized trade in the United States, thus benefiting American consumers—both firms and families—relying on imported products and services. Trade liberalization may be worrisome to mercantilists like Lighthizer, but its virtues have proven themselves repeatedly over time.

Rigorous economic analyses have confirmed these conclusions in the case of TPP. For example, the Peterson Institute for International Economics found that, if implemented, TPP would have raised real incomes in the United States by $131 billion annually by 2030 and increased U.S. exports by nearly $360 billion over that span, more than 9 percent above the 2014 baseline used by the authors of the study. Most of these gains would come from manufactures and services exports. Even the notoriously timid U.S. International Trade Commission, whose projections Lighthizer trumpeted for the trade agreement he completed, found that by 2032 TPP would have raised real income by $57.3 billion, increase GDP by $42.7 billion, create 128,000 jobs, while exports to new trading partners would grow by over 18 percent. Ambassador Lighthizer should ask himself why so many powerful economies—South Korea, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and yes, China—are clamoring to join CPTPP if the agreement is so economically meaningless?

Lighthizer also decries various trade deficits the United States runs with certain CPTPP countries, which was the bête noire of the Trump Administration in which he served. Economists almost universally ignore bilateral trade deficits and the overall trade deficit when considering the effects of U.S. trade policies. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that the U.S. trade deficit—and bilateral trade deficits with TPP members Vietnam, Malaysia, Canada, and Mexico—increased between 2016 and 2019, when TPP was not in force here and Ambassador Lighthizer was spearheading an aggressive, multifront trade war with numerous countries, including close allies. (Indeed, it’s all but certain that Lighthizer’s tariffs on Chinese imports caused imports from those TPP countries—and others—to surge.) Nevertheless, the simple reality is that the balance of trade is driven by larger macroeconomic factors and not a magic scorecard for trade policy.

But what are the real economic results of the United States’ decision to withdraw from CPTPP/TPP? American consumers, including domestic firms relying on imported inputs, face higher prices and fewer choices than their peers in CPTPP/TPP countries, while exporters face higher barriers in reaching new consumers than their competitors in the trade bloc. Indeed, a study from the Canada West Foundation found that U.S. withdrawal from TPP likely cost American exporters $3.1 billion per year in lost sales.

Second, there is the geopolitics. Lighthizer claims that the strategic arguments for the agreement—using TPP as an economic counterweight to China’s growing influence in the Pacific region—are “fallacious.” Like his economic complaints, this too misses the mark.

The geopolitical calculus for U.S. membership in CPTPP/TPP is straightforward: Countries tend to gravitate—economically and diplomatically—toward the largest nation in their region. Through the TPP, however, the United States could provide countries in China’s orbit with an alternative market of similar size, as well as a framework for discussion and dispute resolution based on the rule of law rather than economic might. In other words, CPTPP/TPP was to be a useful tool of soft influence in an increasingly important region of the world, which could be leveraged to help counterbalance China’s economic gravity and Beijing’s legitimately troubling commercial and diplomatic practices. It was not, of course, a silver bullet – but it was surely better than the geopolitical status quo (or, you know, actual bullets).

Proponents of CPTPP/TPP argued that in the absence of U.S. leadership, China would fill the void in writing the rules and establishing the norms that govern commerce in the Asia Pacific region in the 21^st century. Sadly those claims were prescient: As my Cato colleague Colin Grabow explained recently, China’s response to TPP was its own Pacific trade deal, dubbed the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), which went into effect at the beginning of the year. Though generally lower quality and less comprehensive than TPP, RCEP cut tariffs and provided some regulatory harmonization to further integrate the members’ economies.

CPTPP/TPP withdrawal also signaled a dramatic shift in U.S. international economic leadership and damaged its credibility. It was the first trade agreement that the United States negotiated to completion and then failed to ratify and implement. That decision, coupled with the Trump Administration’s reckless trade wars with longstanding allies, sent a distinct message to the rest of the world that the United States was turning inward and could not be trusted to defend the rules and norms it carefully cultivated over the last 70 years. Few could be happier with this outcome than Xi Jinping.

Finally, it is imperative to note what Ambassador Lighthizer tellingly ignores: the results of his own approach to trade policy, heavy on unilateralism and political favoritism and dismissive of economic engagement. Countless academic studies have shown that the tariffs have imposed a significant toll on American consumers. For example, the New York Federal Reserve estimates that the tariffs increased costs by about $830 per year for the typical American household through direct costs and efficiency losses. Meanwhile, Moody’s found that the trade wars cost about 300,000 jobs. Was this approach really better than the admittedly slow and messy “engagement” alternative? Unlikely.

Instead of fighting allies, waging trade wars, and embracing tariffs—not to mention ceding the Asia-Pacific standard setting to Beijing—the Trump Administration and Ambassador Lighthizer should have worked to renegotiate the parts of the agreement that they viewed as misguided. The result still would have been imperfect, but it’d be lightyears better than what we have today.

Hopefully, the Biden Administration can learn from its predecessor’s many mistakes.