A Glimpse of a Canadian-Led International Order

President Donald Trump did not kill the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Although he withdrew the U.S. from the trade deal in the first week of his presidency, on Tuesday—exactly a year after the American withdrawal—the remaining 11 countries announced that they had completed renegotiating a new TPP without Washington. That sets up a perfect natural experiment about American influence in the world. And, at least as far as this one trade deal is concerned, the results are clear: Even in the absence of U.S. leadership, the world’s democracies will continue to trade and make rules for dealing with one another, but without some of the worst excesses of America’s corporate-influenced foreign policy.

For many of the leading lights of the American foreign-policy establishment, the greatest tragedy of the Trump administration’s posture abroad is that that under the Trump administration, “the United States is no longer taking the lead in maintaining alliances, or in building regional and global institutions that set the rules for how international relations are conducted.” The decision to walk away from TPP—an Asian-focused trade deal originally meant to include countries representing 40 percent of the global economy—is central to that assessment, which is shared widely among foreign-policy experts in both parties.