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A Trans-Pacific trade pact orchestrated by the United States has turned into a strategic opportunity for China, while domestic political pressure impedes President Joe Biden’s ability to use American economic clout in the competition with Beijing.
“It's a tool we don't have because of domestic political reasons,” American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Derek Scissors, an expert in U.S. economic relations with Asia and China’s economic policies, told the Washington Examiner.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership was negotiated by former President Barack Obama’s administration in his second term as a way to bind the Pacific Rim more closely to the U.S., then modified after the political forces marshaled by then-candidate Donald Trump and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in the 2016 presidential election season spiked American participation in the pact. China applied last month to join the pact, in the absence of the U.S., and Biden’s brain trust views its overture as a “strategic answer” to American efforts to fortify alliances in the Indo-Pacific.
“And so, [with respect to] those who say that China is doing this for show in CPTPP — I would beg to differ,” Kurt Campbell, the White House National Security Council’s Indo-Pacific Affairs coordinator, said Friday at the United States Institute of Peace. “This is deadly serious. They are interested in deep discussions about what it would take to join.”
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It’s a natural move for Beijing, according to other observers, even if the Chinese Communist regime’s state-run economic system is a poor fit for the pact.
“It was an obvious reaction to finding a weak spot, as to what the U.S. had done to themselves,” an Indo-Pacific official said. “They are constantly keeping everyone on their toes, the Chinese, by doing things which only makes it more important for the rest of the community ... [to] really be on the same page on various issues.”
China’s application could shape the attitudes of the U.S. and other Indo-Pacific governments, despite Beijing’s track record of violating trade agreements, citing the rash of punitive economic punishment inflicted on Australia in the wake of Canberra’s call for a credible investigation into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic.
“We have a diplomatic disadvantage, which is the Chinese are happy to sit down with the CPTPP members. ... It’s not going to be real,” Scissors said. “And we don't have a way to respond, because if we join a trade negotiation, we're supposed to treat it as a trade negotiation. So, that's the dilemma that we're in.”
That mix of domestic political opposition to trade deals and the competition with China appears to have spurred the Biden team to develop a third way, “a proper economic framework” for U.S. engagement with the Indo-Pacific — but don’t call it a trade deal.
"We absolutely do not envision this to be a traditional trade agreement,” Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said last week while traveling with Malaysia. "We do expect it would be developed in close consultation and through robust engagement with a number of stakeholders, especially Congress, as we continue to define our goals and desired outcomes for the framework.”
The right kind of economic overture could pay geopolitical dividends as the U.S. seeks to build a coalition that can deter conflict with China and shape the economic landscape in favor of democratic countries.
“What the region wants is to not have every meeting with the U.S. to be about security, because it makes them uncomfortable, but they want the U.S, to be interested in the region,” Scissors explained. “What the administration is trying to do is thread this needle that we've been discussing where there’s some economics, but it’s not a traditional trade agreement, but it allows us to engage in the region, so here we are diplomatically.”
Campbell thinks some Republicans might look past the fact that “partisanship and tension domestically is high” to recognize the geopolitical stakes of trade policy.
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“I find in my conversation with my Republican friends, sometimes they'll say we have to think, we have to put on our thinking caps, and figure out how to do this economic stuff in a way that brings parties together, that can be politically sustained domestically, and can help us be successful in the region,” he said.
(BBC)
