The abandonment of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement by President Donald Trump late last month offers Malaysia a valuable opportunity to re-examine the balance of risks and benefits that comes with joining the trade accord.

Without the US in the agreement, the crucial carrot of access to its market of 250 million consumers is missing from the equation, so it is easier to evaluate what remains on the positive side of that deal against the drawbacks that emerging economies are exposed to under the TPP regime.

The greater opportunities for Malaysian businesses involved in the country’s major exports — from the electrical and electronics sector to chemical products and primary produce — need to be weighed against the impacts that consumers, workers and small businesses must face when trade is liberalised in an uneven playing field.

Interestingly, the same concern for saving jobs that Trump cites for quitting the TPP has been expressed by critics of the trade deal in Malaysia, where uncompetitive sectors would shed workers when formidable players from developed economies gain access to the local market.

The crux of the matter, therefore, is that businesses are being displaced by the changing trade environment that is the new constant in the current era and, alongside this flux, jobs have become much less secure in recent times.

This is captured, for example, in the latest Deloitte Millennial Survey, which polled 8,000 young professionals in 30 countries. Among 18 areas of personal concern measured in the survey, unemployment ranked third, reflecting an increased pessimism about the future.

It is this anxiety that Trump is riding on as he seeks, rather futilely, to close the American economy to the disruptive forces of globalisation. Also mistakenly, this fear has been translated into an antipathy towards immigrants that has, among other things, resulted in a chaotic travel ban that has rocked the world.

While Trump’s protectionist inclinations resonate with the gut instincts of those who yearn for the security of a sealed border, they unfortunately interfere with a more dispassionate understanding of the economic malaise that is at the root of the current popular disaffection.

As critics of the TPP have noted, the trade deal reflects the attempts of big businesses to install a regulatory system that overrides national legislative and policy frameworks in the name of investment protection.

The motivations behind this oppressive new order are quite apparently rooted in the relentless drive of corporations to expand and secure their markets.

This linear orientation is at odds with the cyclical patterns that can be observed around us and is bound to become unstable over time. The numerous instances of businesses that have disintegrated in the wake of recessions tell us that change is as much a constant in life as in the economic sphere.

A negative corollary of corporate globalisation is the undermining of local economic systems. Typically, small businesses have been sacrificed at the altar of productivity without due recognition for the non-monetary value of these enterprises in sustaining local communities.

Another constant of the globalisation of business is the movement of capital to low-cost jurisdictions, resulting in job losses at the corporations’ home operations.

Today, this phenomenon has taken on a high-tech dimension. As efficiency gains are progressing to new heights with technological breakthroughs and the jobs that machines can perform are being rapidly redefined, the corporate juggernaut is relentlessly rolling over traditional job functions. In the process, the relevance of the human workforce to businesses is increasingly coming under financial scrutiny.

With this scenario, as redundancies due to business rationalisation become more common, it is quite predictable that vulnerable workers would blame an external agent, such as migrants, for their troubles.

But as Trump’s anti-migrant pronouncements demonstrate, an insular response to the multi-dimensional phenomenon of globalisation tends to trade short-term gains, by saving American jobs and boosting wages, for his country’s long-term interests as the world’s economic superpower.

From the geopolitical point of view, the US’ withdrawal from the TPP carries a psychological connotation of a retreat from the battlefront. It foreshadows Washington’s abandonment of its strategic role in containing China’s growing economic influence in the Asia-Pacific, which Barack Obama had made a centrepiece of his foreign policy.

For Malaysia, it is worth pondering whether the fixation over competitiveness in the global trade arena, as exemplified by the rationale for the TPP, is worth the price to be paid by submitting to the demands of a merciless coterie of multinational corporations.

With the TPP in limbo, it may well be a golden opportunity to look at new ways to foster growth with a more humane face.

Some inspiration can be drawn from the excitement that was sparked in the popular imagination by the Occupy Wall Street movement of September 2011. That episode, which drew the world’s attention to the extreme social and economic inequalities that characterise the global economy today, points to the great need for a new orientation towards wealth creation that corrects this deep flaw in the current system.

The time may have come for a growth model that puts more value on economics on a human scale.

R B Bhattacharjee is associate editor at The Edge Malaysia

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