Andy Wong/AP/Press Association Images. All rights reserved.The United States' pivot to Asia died sometime around 11pm GMT on 10 November 2016. It died practically unnoticed, since the world was still struggling with the sheer conceptual enormity of a president Trump.
It had been ill for some time. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, a wide ranging trade deal designed to bring China's neighbours into an economic alliance with the US, met with bipartisan rejection on the campaign trail. In particular, it offended Trump's sense of economic nationalism. “We do not need to enter into another massive international agreement that ties us up and binds us down”, he said in June.
The TPP, the main plank of Obama's Asian rebalancing, finally expired when incoming House minority leader Chuck Schumer confirmed to union leaders that it would not be ratified by Congress.
