Cassey Lee is a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore, and today's quote is from one of his recent papers.  We found it as a Eurasia Review article with the questioning title, "Why is Malaysia So Interested in Joining The TPP?"  The same piece was also published as ISEAS Perspective No. 14.
 
The quote is eye-catching in part because it might just as easily have been written about the United States.  But this is clearly a piece about Malaysia. As Mr. Lee explains, Malaysia's joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations was a natural next step following the collapse of the U.S.-Malaysia FTA negotiations.  He highlights the following elements in the chronology.

Let's put aside for now the question of whether TPP will prove a more congenial setting for U.S.-Malaysia trade talks and consider instead Mr. Lee's assessment of why Malaysian officials want a deal.  The old Clinton campaign line-"It's the economy, stupid"-comes to mind.
 
In the Malaysian context that means how that ethnically diverse country of 31 million people and a GDP of $312 billion relates to the United States.  Malaysia already has free-trade agreements with several of the other TPP countries, including Australia, Chile, New Zealand, Japan, Brunei, Vietnam, and Singapore.  The FTA relationships with the last three of those are through their membership with Malaysia in ASEAN. 
 
In the case of the United States, it isn't just that there is no FTA.  As Mr. Lee sees it, the economic relationship has been slipping.  He writes:

That is not to say that Malaysia doesn't have major defensive interests in TPP as well.  It does.  Among them are the country's Bumiputera policies, which favor Malays over other ethnic groups, its state owned enterprises, and the government's procurement practices.  They are all intertwined, and they will all come under pressure from the anticipated disciplines of a TPP agreement.

Yet, if we read his article correctly, those challenges should be manageable, provided that Malaysia's negotiators can get a deal with high thresholds where necessary and long phase-in times for the toughest provisions.

Further, he suggests, that managing TPP may be a little easier for Malaysia than others because, he writes, "trade agreements such as the TPP do not require parliamentary ratification.  Only cabinet level approval is required."

Technically, he may be right about that.  Reportedly, however, "Mustapa [Mustapa Mohamed, Malaysia's Minister for International Trade and Industry] has reassured that the finalized TPP text will be tabled in the Parliament for debate before Malaysia signs the agreement."  That was from an article last May in Malaysia's Business Circle by Alice Hunter.

Among the more obvious ways of trying to come to grips with a Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement are a) by looking at the participating countries, and b) by looking at the individual issues or provisions.  Once the agreement is public, we assume there will be a raft of matrices lining up the two, the countries and the issues, and we look forward to reading them.

In the meantime, we will try to highlight some of each in these pages over the next several weeks.