Indo-Pacific alphabet soup needs beefing up
In May, US President Joe Biden visited South Korea and Japan with the aim of reaffirming America’s commitment to the Asia-Pacific region after the uncertainties and doubts generated by Donald Trump’s presidency. In Tokyo, Mr Biden launched the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (Ipef) and participated in a summit of the Quad, an informal security grouping that also includes Japan, Australia and India.
The Quad aims to promote and secure a free, open, prosperous and inclusive IndoPacific region, and is widely regarded as a means of checking China’s regional ambitions. But Ipef’s benefits are less obvious to many Asian countries.
Besides the United States, Ipef’s initial signatories are Japan, South Korea, India, Australia, New Zealand and seven member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean). The new grouping supposedly intends to set common rules regarding labour, digital-economy and environmental standards, among others.
But Ipef is not a free-trade agreement that aims to open up markets by lowering tariffs and non-tariff barriers. Emerging and developing Asian economies hoping for greater access to the US market are relatively unenthusiastic about Mr Biden’s new initiative.
Whether the US will be able to keep the group together with the prospect of substantive economic benefits is the great unknown of the project, which is in many ways a thinly veiled attempt to establish a regional economic bloc to compete against China.
Ipef is not the first US-led initiative in that regard, of course. The 12-country TransPacific Partnership (TPP), negotiated during Barack Obama’s presidency, was generally viewed as a high-standard free-trade agreement that would put China at a disadvantage. But Mr Trump withdrew the US from the deal shortly after taking office in 2017, claiming that it was “a rape of our country”.
Sensing that Mr Trump was making a serious strategic mistake that would hand economic leadership in the region to China, then-Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo took the lead in negotiating a follow-up treaty to the TPP. The original pact’s 11 remaining members (including Japan) subsequently concluded the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP).
Japan strongly believes that US accession to the CPTPP would be the best option to cement a free-trade group in the Asia-Pacific region. The problem is that, starting with Mr Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, the political mood in the US has turned against free trade and multilateral trade agreements.
Sadly, Mr Trump’s “America First” approach seems to be lingering. While the US under Mr Biden continues to stay away from CPTPP, China and Taiwan have applied to join it. A framework that was once supposed to exclude China is thus now about to exclude America, and Chinese economic leadership in the Asia-Pacific region looks set to strengthen.
Asian countries, particularly Japan, used to fear US pressure to join free-trade pacts. The US, directly applying the theory of comparative advantage, firmly believed that reciprocal tariff reductions — say, by the US and Japan – would benefit both countries. It is both ironic and untimely that the US has turned its back on the CPTPP. Today, Japan and other Asian countries are longing for America to return to the free-trade framework.
After all, the US has long been a key member of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) forum, established in 1989 with the main goal of promoting free trade. However, momentum for trade liberalisation among Apec members was gradually lost.
Attention is instead increasingly shifting to the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (Rcep), a large free-trade area that entered into force in January this year and consists of ten Asean countries plus Japan, South Korea, China, Australia and New Zealand.
Significant overlap inheres between the members of Ipef and Rcep. Eleven countries belong to both. In addition, Ipef includes the US and India, while Rcep counts China, Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia among its members. The difference in memberships could determine whether China takes the regional economic lead and contains the US, or vice versa. Unless the US further opens its domestic market to imports from Asean countries by lowering tariffs and non-tariff barriers, many Asian economies may find the Ipef framework unattractive.
The Indo-Pacific already boasts a thick alphabet soup of economic and trade agreements. If Mr Biden does not add some beef to Ipef, then his new dish risks seeming but thin gruel by comparison.