Trade deal in intensive care

US President Barack Obama has announced his impotent, lame-duck status with a humiliating defeat in congress that probably kills his only significant trade deal, profoundly undercuts the American position in Asia and is in every way deeply inimical to Australia’s interests.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership may not be quite dead, but it is in intensive care and the outlook is bleak.

The process is caught in byzantine parliamentary manoeuvres, but the bottom line is that only 40 Democrats in the House of Representatives would vote for the continuation of a trade-adjustment program, which is a Democrat-created program of decades standing, because this legislation was tied to trade-promotion authority legislation in the Senate.

Obama’s fellow Democrats knew that by taking this vote they were all but killing the TPP, and killing the authority of their woefully ineffective president.

Obama could not even convince Nancy Pelosi, the leader of the congressional Democrats, whom he had personally lobbied twice on the day of the vote, to support his position.

It is one of the most comprehensive humiliations for a president in modern American politics. This means Obama is a comprehensive washout in Asia.

He has always been a weak president, weak at home and weak abroad.

He seemingly now has no ability to deliver anything.

It’s a good thing he got a Nobel Peace Prize at the start of his presidency, for when you look at what he actually accomplished as President, it amounts to more or less nothing.

Everyone in Asia will now be making new calculations about how to cope with a uniquely weak and wounded president.