U.S. trade negotiators are busy negotiating our biggest-ever trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). This new agreement, which they hope to complete this year, is with 10 Pacific Rim countries, including Australia, Canada, Chile, Mexico, Peru and Vietnam. The terms of this deal eventually will determine our trade relations with China, Russia, Japan and others.

It is critical for Americans to reconsider our approach to so-called free trade. The concept was sold on the false assumption that all parties benefit equally from trade. If countries simply lower their tariffs, all goods will become cheaper; then countries will make only what they are most competitive at producing and buy the rest from others. Everybody wins.

That might work in textbooks, but it bears no relation to the reality of global trade. Today, many governments extensively intervene in international markets to cheat the most competitive producers out of their share of global business.

Nevertheless, U.S. trade policy leaders continue to operate according to this faulty ideology as they negotiate the TPP and other trade agreements.

The world’s largest corporations promote these so-called free-trade arrangements because they enable them to engage in the wholesale movement of factories from country to country, not just in search of low-cost labor but also to profit from a long list of unfair and illegal trade advantages they gain by partnering with cheater nations like China.

They look for countries where workers have few or no rights and where environmental, health and safety regulations are few or unenforced. As a fellow businessman told me, “I’d be arrested if I ran my factory in the U.S. like my overseas competitor does — but his imports are on the shelves next to my products, and customers can’t tell the difference.”

Instead of old-style agreements that push America’s national interests aside in favor of the blind free-trade ideology advocated by well-heeled lobbyists, America needs a new trade model like the 21st Century Trade Agreement Principles proposed by trade-reform advocates.

The organizations that developed the 21st Century Trade Agreement Principles represent manufacturing, agricultural, worker, consumer and citizen interests. The new model calls for a comprehensive national economic and security strategy that will rebalance trade and grow our economy. (Find the four-page document at www.prosperousamerica.org.)

What our politicos call “free-trade agreements” really aren’t that at all. These agreements lock in a system that works to the advantage of countries like China because it allows global corporations to move their plants, research, products, money and jobs wherever they wish, unimpeded by just and necessary legal limits.

Several decades of this have devastated domestic manufacturing and the global economy. Multinationals are making record profits while widespread unemployment and community decline persist across the U.S. The American middle class — the foundation of America’s strength — is shrinking and we can’t seem to gain the economic momentum to regrow it.

U.S. trade policy requires closer scrutiny. The best place to begin is the TPP. With much of the world caught in recession, the answer is to change course, not to double down on failed policy.

The 21st Century Trade Agreement Principles advocates for agreements that promote effective trade law enforcement and don’t give special legal advantages to foreign interests, as existing agreements do. It also calls for rules to ensure that enterprises owned or controlled by foreign governments don’t distort the free and fair flow of trade or compete with private companies in the U.S.

The president believes the TPP agreement will increase U.S. exports and create much-needed jobs, but it will achieve these goals only if it looks very different than NAFTA and other post-World War II-style trade agreements. That world no longer exists.

Poll after poll confirms there is bipartisan opposition among Americans to more of these bad old trade deals. We have seen the reality of the mass layoffs, shuttered factories and decimated communities these deals and the historic and unsustainable $560 billion trade deficit they created have wrought.

Americans want trade agreements that are designed for the New Global Economy. They want growth, jobs and widely shared prosperity.

TPP presents the president with a unique opportunity to show the American people that he really is moving America’s policies into the new century by adopting standards like those proposed in the 21st Century Trade Agreement Principles.

Dave Frengel is director of government affairs for Penn United Technologies, Cabot.