President Obama’s Smoking Problem

Photo Credit: Politico

Malaysia’s government is battling against a smoking epidemic that threatens its young people — and it fears Barack Obama’s big Pacific trade deal will make the health crisis even worse.

When the president, a reformed smoker himself, lands in Kuala Lumpur this weekend for his third stop in a weeklong Asia swing, he’ll be visiting one of the other 12 Pacific Rim countries hoping to close the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free-trade agreement that American and Asian businesses see as worth billions in sales into new markets.

But Malaysia is smarting that Obama’s negotiators won’t back the country’s efforts to take a strict anti-tobacco approach in the trade deal.

Malaysia’s fear is that it will suffer the same fate that Uruguay, Australia and Thailand have in other trade deals: dragged into an expensive, years-long international legal fight over its right to block cigarette companies from advertising.

When Malaysia’s trade negotiators have pushed to carve tobacco out of a section of the deal that would otherwise allow businesses to challenge whether a country’s laws and regulations meet its international trade obligations before an independent panel, the United States has balked and instead called for an approach that Malaysian officials believe would leave their country exposed.