After five years of intense negotiations, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) may come to fruition by the end of this year. Much has been written (and rightly so) about the negative consequences of the TPP for American labor. But what are the international implications of the TPP, and in a world awash with bilateral and multilateral trade and investment treaties (there are over 3,200 international investment treaties alone), how is this one different?

And when the future of global capitalism seems to hinge on the relations between China and the United States, why is the US not allowing the world’s largest exporter, China (which has expressed interest), to join the TPP negotiations?

With the phenomenal growth of many formerly Third World countries (or “emerging markets”), including China, leading to the expansion and heightened integration of global capitalism, the ideal world envisaged by American state planners in the 1940s and 1950s — one open and friendly to American business in particular but Western capitalism in general — is finally being established beyond their wildest dreams. Virtually every state (albeit unevenly) now equates national development with increasing international competitiveness, and making their nations safe for global capital (which more often than not means American capital).