Every country (or every major country and essentially every country) in the world has laws about how they treat goods bought from or sold to the US. We have treaties with them to try to improve the favorability of these laws. That's fact. These treaties are a deal. Whether we structure that deal by getting ten countries together or one is a detail. It may be important from one perspective. I'm more interested in what we want when we deal and what we are ready to give up when we start bargaining.
For instance is it important that they don't use child labor? Or slave labor? What about the environmental rules? The list is long.
If you want me to negotiate the purchase of a car for you I not only want to know what you'd like but I want to get a sense of how important it is to you. Is $1,000 for a sunroof too much or too little? I know you'd like it if it's free, but it won't be. You probably don't want it if it has to be custom made for $10,000. But where are you in between?
When I hear about a deal like TPP people just say it's good or bad. Even me. I like the concept of TPP but I don't really know any details. A trade negotiator might say "We loved draft #57 but Japan hated it. When didn't like draft $58. Both the US and Japan liked #59, but Malaysia and Indonesia didn't. " So what were they asking for and what were they giving away? Don't give me some principles. Everybody in the room understood that a trade deal was good. But how fussy were we with, say, the child labor clause? Too fussy or not fussy enough? What would you have done differently? Give me ANY specifics. I would have put more emphasis on protecting our high value products and making them more competitive and less emphasis on protecting our uncompetitive low value industries, like steel, textiles, shoes, agriculture, and even autos. If every country makes men's shirts I'm not interested in getting concessions; I'm giving concessions to the countries that don't make much else. I want them to buy our products that only we make (e.g. social media, a specific movie). Or only a few countries can make (e,g, satellites, microprocessors).
Instead of commenting on my proposal, or Trump's, tell me what you'd have told opur trade negotiators to do differently when negotiating TPP or NAFTA. Obviously whether you can get the other countries to do it is important so I want to hear about where you'd give to get what you want and why you think that would work. For example if you'd like stronger child labor features what do you think would be a concession that would get that feature in the treaty?