President Barack Obama infamously killed the multilateral Doha Round last December by instructing his representative at the World Trade Organisation to be a “rejectionist” negotiator. He compounded the folly by instead floating the trans-Pacific Trade Initiative that is conceived in a spirit of confronting China rather than promoting trade, and is also a cynical surrender to self-seeking Washington lobbies that would have made John Kenneth Galbraith blush. Not content with these body blows to the world trading system, which his predecessors had built up over decades of US leadership, Mr Obama pulled off the remarkable feat of making things yet worse with his State of the Union address.
美國總統巴拉克?奧巴馬(Barack Obama)授意美駐世貿組織(WTO)代表作一名“說不的”談判者，以這種不光彩的手段扼殺了去年12月的多哈回合多邊談判。后來他錯上加錯地提出了“跨太平洋貿易倡議”(trans-Pacific Trade Initiative)。外界認為，該倡議的主旨在于對抗中國，而不是促進貿易；此外，它還是對追逐私利的華盛頓游說勢力的一次悲觀屈服——如果約翰?肯尼思?加爾布雷斯(John Kenneth Galbraith)活著的話，會為此舉感到臉紅。奧巴馬并不滿足于自己給世界貿易體系（該體系是其多屆前任在美國稱霸世界的數十年間建立起來的）帶來的這些重創，通過近日發表的國情咨文演說，他實現了一項了不起的成就：讓局面變得更糟。