Over the past three years — in an apparent rush to sign off on as many trade deals as possible — Australia has failed to ask the hard questions about the purpose of trade policy and how trade deals specifically help the country advance its economic, geopolitical and social goals.

With the U.S. pulling out of the TPP, Donald Trump talking tough on the South China Sea and hints that Barak Obama's refugee deal with Australia might be on the skids, we ask where Australia fits in this new geopolitical landscape.

With all the debates on whether China will join the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement now that President Trump has officially rejected it, or if the TPP can exist as a 12 nations minus one agreement, you’d be forgiven for thinking it still could go ahead. It can’t.

Partisan tensions over the desirability of preferential trade deals and the conflation of trade and foreign policy are by no means new to Australia, nor are tensions over the “trade as” vs “trade and industry policy” positions. However, as this extract from Navigating the New International Disorder makes clear, these tensions were amplified over the 2011–15 period thanks largely to key policy elites.

President-elect Donald Trump is right: The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a damaging deal and deserves to be killed off. But he tells a half truth about why the trade accord among a dozen Pacific Rim nations is a bad deal.

Explaining the Striking Revival of Financial Activism in South Korea since 1997: Towards an agent-centred understanding of developmental states and their evolution.

Dr Elizabeth Thurbon (UNSW)

Dr Elizabeth Thurbon from UNSW Australia argues the Australian government is disempowering Australian companies

The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) is just the latest in a string of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) concluded by the Australian government since the 2013 election win, including the China, Korea and Japan deals.

Here are five of the key things you need to know about the TPP.