STAHP PLAYING!!! Brandon Ain't Got No Economic Strategy For The Asia-Pacific Region...,

foreignpolicy |  Months after U.S. President Joe Biden first indicated that his administration would launch a new Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) that would signal strengthened U.S. engagement with Asian economies, the president, together with the leaders of a dozen countries from across Asia, announced the launch of the IPEF in Tokyo on May 23.

The Biden administration is convinced that the new framework is an opportunity to showcase what senior U.S. officials have described as a “foreign policy for the middle class,” an initiative that fulfills a strategic need while delivering results for U.S. workers and businesses.

In a discussion with the press before the IPEF’s launch, U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan stated that “expanding U.S. economic leadership in the Indo-Pacific through vehicles like IPEF is good for America.” U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, whose department is responsible for negotiating three of the framework’s four pillars, described it as “an important turning point in restoring U.S. economic leadership in the region and presenting Indo-Pacific countries an alternative to China’s approach,” And U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai called it an opportunity to “tackle 21st-century challenges and promote fair and resilient trade for years to come.”

However, while Japan and other U.S. partners in Asia have wanted Washington to reinvigorate economic cooperation with the region ever since former U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in 2017, there is some unease about the IPEF. After all, Asia-Pacific governments have been clear that they would prefer that the United States rejoin the TPP—now rechristened as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP)—to any alternative.

The slow process of determining what will be in the four “pillars” of the IPEF, how negotiations will be handled due to a division of labor between the U.S. trade representative and the commerce secretary, and uncertainty about which governments would sign up have deepened the ambivalence.

As a result of this ambivalence, the joint statement launching the framework referred to “collective discussions toward future negotiations,” indicating that there is more work to do to flesh out the initiative.

Asian governments are not wrong to have mixed feelings about the IPEF. U.S. trade officials plan to seek higher labor and environmental performances from negotiating partners, but they have also indicated that they are not prepared to offer access to the U.S. market—let alone pursue a TPP-style free trade agreement. Tai, the U.S. trade representative, has described such conventional agreements, which provide broad market access in exchange for pledges to improve labor and environmental standards that critics contend will likely have little practical impact on real-world conditions, as a “20th-century tool.” She wants to show that it is possible to pursue an international economic policy that delivers for working- and middle-class Americans.