Negotiations on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) “have de factor failed,” Germany’s Vice-Chancellor and Minister for Economic Affairs Sigmar Gabriel said this week and “nobody is really admitting the failure.” In addition, France’s Minister of Foreign Trade Matthias Fekl said that there is no longer any political support for TTIP negotiations in France and France wants to end TTIP negotiations altogether.
The UK was seen as one of the strongest supporters of TTIP in the European Union, so its vote to leave the EU will remove one of the United States’s closest allies in the talks, as the UK is generally pro-free trade and pro-American.
If negotiations were completed and the trade deal ratified, TTIP would be the world’s largest trade agreement and would have created a single common market of 820 million consumers. American and European diplomats have spent the last three years negotiating the agreement. The proposed treaty has 27 chapters that cover issues ranging from market access and trade barriers, anti-corruption measures, and intellectual-property protections, among others. Reportedly, after 14 rounds of talks, no agreement has been reached on even one chapter out of the 27 being deliberated. The last round of negotiations took place in Brussels in July–the third round in six months.
TTIP and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) are major policy priorities for the Obama administration as it enters its final months before the election. In the United States, both trade agreements have been under criticism from the left and the right and presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton both oppose TPP. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said last week that TPP “won’t be acted upon this year,” effectively punting the fate of TPP to the next president.
