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US unveils Asia-Pacific trade framework, but questions remain
The countries touted the IPEF as a framework for what will ultimately become a tight-knit group of trading nations.
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resident Joe Biden launched a new Asia-Pacific trade initiative on Monday in Tokyo, with 13 countries including India and Japan signing up, although questions about the pact's effectiveness remain.
Biden formally unveiled the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF) on his second day in Japan, where he is also holding talks with Prime Minister Fumio Kishida before joining a Quadrilateral Security Dialogue summit on Tuesday.
"This framework is a commitment to working with our close friends and partners in the region on challenges that matter most to ensuring economic competitiveness in the 21st century," he said.
Unlike traditional trade blocs, there is no plan for IPEF members to negotiate tariffs and ease market access, a tool that has become increasingly unpalatable to US voters fearful of seeing homegrown manufacturing undermined.
Instead, the program foresees integrating partners through agreed standards in four main areas: the digital economy, supply chains, clean energy infrastructure and anticorruption measures.
The starting list of members, in addition to the United States, is Australia, Brunei, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand and Vietnam.
The countries touted the IPEF as a framework for what will ultimately become a tight-knit group of trading nations.
"We share a commitment to a free, open, fair, inclusive, interconnected, resilient, secure, and prosperous Indo-Pacific region," they said in a joint statement.
"Deepening economic engagement among partners is crucial for continued growth, peace, and prosperity."
Rebuilding alliances
Together, the participants account for about 40 percent of the global gross domestic product (GDP) and "there are other countries that could conceivably join us", Biden's national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, told reporters.
Since taking office in 2021, Biden has pushed to rapidly rebuild strategic military and trade alliances weakened under his predecessor Donald Trump.
The IPEF is intended to offer US allies an alternative to China's growing commercial presence across the Asia-Pacific.
However, there is no political will in Washington for returning to a tariffs-based Asia trade deal following Trump's 2017 withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a huge trading bloc that was revived under a new name in 2018 without US membership.
While the TPP reduced trade barriers for members, US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo emphasized that the IPEF was not designed to go down the same route, telling reporters that the "framework is intentionally designed not to be a same old, same old traditional trade agreement".
Even so, Japan's Kishida said there was still an appetite for US involvement in the larger pact abandoned by Trump. The country welcomed the new framework and would "participate and cooperate", he said, but "from a strategic standpoint, Japan hopes that the United States will return to the TPP".
No Taiwan
China has criticized the IPEF as an attempt to create a closed club but Sullivan rejected this, saying, "it is by design and definition an open platform".
Taiwan, the self-governing democracy that China claims sovereignty over, has pointedly not been brought into the initial lineup, despite being an important link in supply chains for microchips.
Sullivan said nevertheless that the US was "looking to deepen our economic partnership with Taiwan, including on high-technology issues, including on semiconductors and supply chains". This would happen, however, only "on a bilateral basis".
The US faces skepticism, given the lack of incentives to go along with the IPEF's plan for smoother integration. Without offering increased access to the huge US market, it is unclear what enforcement mechanisms could be applied.
But Raimondo said if the IPEF had been in place before the COVID-19 pandemic triggered mass economic shutdowns, the US would have "experienced much less disruption". More broadly, the US trade-boosting initiative was welcomed by businesses that "increasingly look for alternatives to China", she said.
