the third day of his presidency, Donald Trump declared: "Everyone knows what that means, right? We've been talking about this for a long time". What was the newly elected President talking about? The previous US administration, under President Obama expended significant resources and energy on achieving a deal, a major trade agreement between eleven countries in the Asia-Pacific region, representing 40% of global GDP: the Trans-Pacific Partnership. It was evidently a means of maintaining US presence in Asia and Oceania and implementing US standards in regional economic relations, in order to prevent China from doing so. It was one of the main US projects aimed at opposing or limiting Chinese rise in the Asia-Pacific region. However, as early as April 2015, Donald Trump asserted that the agreement was (I quote) "an attack on America's business", that "China has a backdoor into the Trans-Pacific Partnership" and that "China [was] laughing at [the United States]". And, at the beginning of 2017, he decided not to launch the ratification process of this very ambitious agreement on which the US had been working hard for years. How should China react to this rapid and drastic change in US foreign trade policy towards the Pacific region and China? What was the previous US strategy and what is the current one? Is this new strategy merely part of a global policy of withdrawal from multilateral institutions and multilateral rules of the "liberal global order"? And finally, how should China understand this situation and respond to the consequential weakening of the international legal order?