“We intend to complete negotiations on a Trans-Pacific Partnership,” President Obama pledged in his 2013 State of the Union address.

In his 2014 State of the Union speech, he made no explicit reference to the TPP, which unleashed speculation about whether Washington’s trade consensus is crumbling.

What is dividing Washington is the recognition that the TPP is not a transparent process to achieve free trade in Asia Pacific, but an opaque mechanism to extend preferential trade across the region.

By the same token, the TPP has left Beijing apprehensive.

The cumbersome TPP process

Historically, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is about a decade old. It originates from a 2005 free trade agreement (FTA) among Brunei, Chile, New Zealand and Singapore.

The founding partners saw TPP as a way to expand their narrow pact into a broad trade agreement, which would cover all goods and services, and inclusive initiative, which would be open to new members and well aligned with other regional initiatives.

After the global crisis in 2008-9, Washington began to lead talks for a vastly expanded, but different FTA, which includes all three NAFTA nations (US, Canada, Mexico), ASEAN tigers (Singapore, Malaysia, even Vietnam), small Latin American countries (Chile, Peru), Oceania (Australia, New Zealand) and East Asia (Japan, South Korea) – minus China.

Ever since Japan joined the talks last year, the TPP has attracted increasing interest in the rest of East and Southeast Asia (South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Philippines), and South Asia (India), and to a degree even in China.

In the Obama White House, the TPP has been driven by the sense that, for two long decades, the U.S. has failed to participate in Asia’s rapid growth. It is also supported by a strategic quest to move US military presence from the transatlantic axis to the trans-Pacific. Finally, the talks have been pushed by President Obama’s pledge to double U.S. exports to rejuvenate American economy.

In turn, potential non-U.S. TPP members see TPP as a way to open access, as Vietnam, or to widen access to attractive markets, as Mexico. Other countries, especially Southeast nations that feel sandwiched between the U.S. and China, regard the TPP as a hedging device to ensure the U.S. presence in the region amidst China’s rise. Still others consider the TPP a political instrument to seize external trade to execute structural reforms in domestic markets. In Japan, for instance, the TPP has a central role in Shinzo Abe’s structural reform agenda.