High on the agenda of US President Barack Obama's latest visit to Germany is the transatlantic trade deal, to which he is giving a fresh push before his term ends.

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), once completed, will be the largest free trade zone in the world by minimizing trade barriers between the US and the EU. The first round of negotiations took place in 2013. Despite calls for a comprehensive agreement by the end of 2015, Obama and his European counterparts have so far failed to push it through.

But Obama apparently wants to leave a legacy regarding his administration's Europe policies after he steps down early next year. He has to grasp the moment to clinch the deal to consolidate the strategic transatlantic alliance.

Ideally, the TTIP can help generate jobs and boost the sluggish US and European economies. More importantly, the pact can pioneer new approaches toward higher standards for international traders. The US and the EU have been used to dominating the global rules-based order. But with the emergence of developing economies such as China and their growing impact on the world's economic trends, the US and the EU are not reconciled to becoming standard-takers from standard-makers.

With the West's influence declining, some Western conservatives worry that new emerging countries will not be bound by existing rules, while problems in a new era cannot be solved by outdated principles. Therefore, they have attached great importance to international rule-making.

The TTIP, as well as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), have been portrayed as a tool to counter emerging countries. But given the ever globalized world and intertwined economic interests between one and another, the West wants to stand in a more influential position through efforts like the TTIP and TPP to drag rising economies into the orbit of the West-led rule-making process and guiding their global economic activities.

These are where the interests of both sides would contradict. For instance, the West is about to set high standards on intellectual property rights (IPR) within the TTIP, yet the US-Chinese disagreements over IPR have already become a wedge between them. In the foreseeable future, given the weight of US and European markets in the world, rules made by the US and Europe will exert a certain impact on their trade relations with emerging countries. The trajectory of the world economy depends on how the rising powers and their transatlantic partners will engage with each other.