The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations aspired to integrate the world’s two largest economies – the United States and the European Union (EU) – and bridge the world’s most valuable and complex economic relationship. Their emphasis on mitigating the adverse trade effects of domestic policies made them also substantively the most ambitious trade negotiations the world has yet seen.

When the negotiations were launched in June 2013, expectations were high for the swift conclusion of an ambitious agreement. United States Trade Representative (USTR) Michael Froman famously declared that he expected the negotiation to be concluded on “one tank of gas”. European officials suggested that a deal by the end of 2014 was doable.

The case for the agreement was strong. Officials on both sides of the Atlantic promoted it as a means of spurring on economic recovery in the wake of the global financial crisis; of responding to the rise of China, both by setting standards that would de facto become global standards and by boosting the competitiveness of US and European firms; and, subsequently, of bolstering the transatlantic alliance in the face of Russian aggression in Ukraine (De Gucht 2015: xvii; Froman 2014: 114–15). Despite these motivations, the negotiations dragged, and no end was in sight even before the twin blows of the UK’s vote to leave the EU and Donald Trump’s election as president of the United States. As I argue in Chapter 7, these events spelled the end of TTIP, at least in its current form. This short book explains why optimism was initially so high, and why it turned out to be misplaced. It also highlights the implications for future trade negotiations.

The initial optimism about the prospects of TTIP reflected the broad support for the agreement among transnational business interests and high-level political support, particularly in Europe. Not only did firms on both sides of the Atlantic favour an agreement, in many cases they agreed on the terms they wanted to see. There was thus an unprecedented degree of cooperation among business interests behind the agreement. In addition, labour unions were not particularly opposed to the deal.