Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership

• UK foreign policy has long been shaped by a particular geopolitical way of conceiving the nation’s place in the world.
• This island identity may have been forged in imperial times, but it remains hugely relevant in the post-Brexit world.
• To be an island was to be democratic, sovereign, freedom-loving, mobile and a bastion of limitless and global free trade.

Your sovereign neighbour

• The Falklands Conflict provided ample opportunity for Margaret Thatcher to restate a powerful island identity that she felt was becoming lost.
• These impulses to define the UK as a sovereign, mobile, freedom-loving island helped politicians to navigate the huge changes that occurred since 1945.
• Never more than lukewarm about Brexit, “Global Britain” was Theresa May’s attempt to name the UK’s posture after leaving the EU.
• But in many ways, Global Britain is not about the present so much as the past and the future.

What is an island in the 21st century?

• Yet there is far less unity about what it means to be an island in this fractious 21st century than there was during the imperial era.
• Many historians have argued that the empire provided the glue between the constituent parts of the UK.
• Without the empire or the EU, are we now seeing the true nature of a disunited Kingdom?

• 3653, the Undertaking Negotiations on Investment and Trade for Economic Dynamism (UNITED) Act, which would grant the President, in consultation with Congress, the power to seek a comprehensive trade agreement between the United States and the United Kingdom.
• The report tracks trade agreements since 2010 and shows that China, Japan, the European Union, and Canada have all outpaced the U.S. in creation of new bilateral and multilateral trade arrangements.
• “We celebrate the UNITED Act’s bipartisan support in both chambers of Congress to get back to work on building American economic growth through smart trade agreements.
• The Corn Refiners Association (CRA) is the national trade association representing the corn refining industry of the United States.

• The trade pact, signed by 15 Asia-Pacific countries in November 2020, will be fully implemented among all member economies on June 2.
• The signatories are China, Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea, as well as the 10 states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
• Hainan is well positioned to serve as an important hub for comprehensive strategic cooperation between China and ASEAN countries due to its geographic proximity, Wang said.
• It brings vast investment opportunities and greater market access to business communities in most of the emerging economies in the region, he added.

• It raises confidence Australia can maintain a constructive relationship with China even as US-China relations continue to deteriorate.
• China imposed an 80.5% import tariff on Australian barley in May 2020, on the grounds Australian barley was sold in the Chinese market at a price lower than its price in Australia (known as “dumping”) and was subsidised, harming China’s barley growers.
• China’s Ministry of Commerce began an anti-dumping and anti-subsidy investigation into barley in November 2018.

What the barley agreement means

• Digging into the details of the barley deal, China has agreed to conduct an expedited review of barley tariffs in the next three or four months.
• China’s Ministry of Commerce initiated a review
  on April 14, based on an application lodged by the China Alcoholic Drinks Association.
• For Australia, this offers a quicker path to get barley back in the Chinese market than proceeding with the WTO case.
• Read more:
  It might look like China is winning the trade war, but its import bans are a diplomacy fail

Knocking on the Trans-Pacific Partnership’s door

• The trade pact involves 11 Pacific-rim nations and now Britain, whose request to join was approved by the other signatories in March.
• China lodged its application to join after the UK, in September 2021.
• That’s not unexpected, because no country has a bigger stake in global trade.

From cautious optimism to reasonable confidence

• This has involved incrementally rebuilding economic cooperation while managing disagreements on values and security issues through calm and professional engagement.
• Add in political willingness and diplomatic wisdom, and an assessment of cautious optimism can be replaced by one of reasonable confidence in the upward trajectory of the bilateral relationship.