By re-engaging with its neighbors, especially American allies, in a formal alliance system, China would set up the function of preventative cooperation. That would help to maintain regional peace and security.

While the U.S.-led Trans-Pacific Partnership has potential to split Asia Pacific, it could be used as a foundation for truly free trade, along with other free trade plans in the region.

Because existing trade terms mean 80% of TPP members’ exports to the U.S. are already duty-free while even a bigger percentage of China’s manufactured goods enjoy that status, the agreement’s bottom-line impact on trade is negligible for now. The deal is more about who gets to write the long-term rules of global governance, which for China is both a challenge and an opportunity to reshape its economy in the direction it was going anyway.

Based on what we know from leaks, Transatlantic and Pacific trade deals disproportionally empower corporations. Instead of trade regionalism driven by corporatism and overrated security imperatives, the EU, the USA and China, should join forces and with a trilateral trade commission shape a vast economic space from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.

Open to insiders and restrictive to outsiders, as they lower trade barriers among member economies, regional FTAs tend to build higher trade barriers against non-member economies. Often tools for working around loopholes in the WTO, such regional agreements buck the trend toward globalization.

For China and the United States, a new type of economic and trade relationship with each other is in the best interest of the two major powers, and they should work towards this end. That will require Washington to view the new TTP through the lens of its best economic interests, and join China in creating the world’s largest free-trade zone by around 2030.

It is hard to avoid the U.S.-China bipolar narrative, although this over-simplistic analysis misses other measures of global power and insecurity. Xenia Wicket argues there is no single paramount power, but a variety of nodes of state and non-state actors.

Whether or not the struggling talks produce an agreement soon, the US and China do not need to be defensive about the TPP. Instead, they should open an obstruction-free channel for dialogue, through which both countries can use anticipatory diplomacy to enhance mutual trust.

New agreements on collaboration in such areas as agriculture, grain production, civil aviation, high-speed railways, law enforcement, and military-to-military relations will further deepen interdependence. Xi’s visit has increased mutual confidence, reduced mutual suspicion, with achievements that made it a milestone in bilateral relations.

Political campaigns generally are not well-suited for the thoughtful discussion of complex, nuanced international issues. Lately, China has been a target of GOP pre-election attacks, and it should be known that there is a difference between coming across as tough, and bungling diplomacy all together.