The U.S. political elite is never entirely secretive about its aims. It spells them out, maybe not always clearly and maybe sometimes elliptically, but it is fairly open in declaring its objectives and how it intends to achieve them. When she was U.S. secretary of state, Hilary Clinton adumbrated the Trans-Pacific Partnership in a 2011 article in Foreign Affairs, the magazine of the Council on Foreign Relations, an elite-consensus forming organization which Laurence H. Shoup in a recent book dubbed “Wall Street’s Think Tank”, and, in an earlier book, an “imperial brain trust.” [1]
In “America’s Pacific Century,” Clinton announced that the Obama administration was “working with China to end unfair discrimination against U.S. and other foreign companies or against their innovative technologies, remove preferences for domestic firms, and end measures that disadvantage or appropriate foreign intellectual property.” [2] Which is exactly what the TPP sets out to do, except—and this is a significant point—without China.