US trade commitment to the Indo-Pacific is empty

It’s hard to be a global trade powerhouse vying for geoeconomic preeminence when you can’t sign binding trade deals, but that’s more or less where the Biden White House is. Ten years ago, when the Obama administration was pushing forward the regional mega-deal of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, you would have been mocked by Washington for predicting that, with the United States dropping out of the deal, Beijing would ask to join a pact initially designed to counter China’s economic weight. But the toxicity of formal trade deals on Capitol Hill, which predates President Joe Biden and even Donald Trump, and among Bidens’ electoral base has effectively shut down one of America’s primary vehicles for projecting influence. economic.

Seeking an Asia-Pacific alternative to what is now the CPTPP (prefixed Comprehensive and Progressive), the United States last year announced the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, a series of agreements with 13 other nations.

Its first results, from an initiative on supply chains, were unveiled nearly two weeks ago. They weren’t impressive. The American announcement was a mass of abstract verbiage with a tangle of subclauses adorned with adjectives and adverbs superimposed on two or three layers. It is committed, among other things, to ensuring that workers and businesses, particularly micro, small and medium-sized enterprises, in IPEF partner economies benefit from resilient, robust and efficient supply chains by identifying disturbances or potential disturbances. and react quickly, effectively and, if possible, collectively. Is everything clear now?

In the age-old tradition of talking shops reoccurring, the announcement has no binding mechanisms but instead sets up a new Supply Chain Council, a Supply Chain Crisis Response Network and this being the Biden administration a Labor Rights Advisory Council.

The fundamental flaw of the IPEF is exactly that predicted by experienced trading people from the start. Without substantial new access to the US market or other trade privileges offered, there is little incentive for partner countries to make big commitments themselves. The IPEF will not substantially divert value networks away from China or significantly thwart Beijing’s geoeconomic influence.

To be sure, IPEF has acquired some of the political trappings of a formal preferential trade agreement. Guided by muscle memory, characters familiar from the PTA controversies of the past decades swung into action. A range of U.S. trade organizations, from the Software & Information Industry Association to the National Pork Producers Council complained there is not enough in it for them. Congress was breathless of its prerogatives, in this case whether it can veto agreements. Environmental and labor activists, including the non-governmental organization Public Citizen, those old faithful battle horses of the globalization skeptic movement, rose to the sound of distant bugles and organized a demonstration outside of an IPEF ministerial meeting. IPEF isn’t so much a business deal as it is a TPP re-enactment company: awesome battles with realistic weapon replicas, but no one gets hurt.

Now, it’s certainly true, as the Biden administration argues, that there are other ways to do trade policy than the big, multi-pronged preferential trade deals, that other major trading powers like the EU are also struggling to get signed and ratified. Academic and former US official Kathleen Claussen pointed out the quiet but rapid proliferation of small U.S. deals on issues ranging from food regulation to consumer privacy in recent years.

Those who are relatively supportive of the administrations’ negotiation strategy, such as Chad Bown of the Peterson Institute think tank in Washington, argue that the IPEF could be a way to create targeted agreements on the supply of critical raw materials and other friendship agreements. But, as the US has shown with its critical mining deals with Brussels and Tokyo, essentially a way to grant European and Japanese companies access to electric vehicle tax credits under the Bidens Act. on reducing inflation, it can be done quickly and ad hoc. They don’t need a heavy regional bargaining structure.

Indonesia, for example, an IPEF member, is courted by China and other auto-making economies for its rich deposits of nickel, used in batteries for electric vehicles. Indonesian producers want a key minerals deal with the United States to unlock IRA tax credits and incentivize them to export there in some way a lure similar to preferential market access at the Ancient. If the United States is serious about making Indonesia a reliable part of its automotive supply chain, it should act quickly and strike a bilateral deal rather than waiting for the next dense slab of IPEF rhetoric to slip from the bureaucratic production line in several months or years. time.

The Biden administration is right that geopolitics and value networks are changing too quickly for old-fashioned trade deals to be solved on their own. But smaller, more targeted transactions still need incentives to work. IPEF produces many words but few business rewards. The real work of building trade alliances will continue elsewhere.

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