The Biden administration is trying to piece together a trade deal, reports suggested on Sunday, called the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF) that might give the U.S. economy a boost before Election Day without looking like capitulation to China or alienating labor unions.
The process of stitching this deal over the past year has reportedly been awkward and disorganized, so the end result is unlikely to be a work of beauty.
As the Washington Post put it on Sunday, the goal is to “bind the United States more closely to allies in the region as a way to counter the growing influence of China” with a trade partnership that could be rolled out at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in San Francisco this week.
Chinese dictator Xi Jinping will attend the summit and reportedly plans to meet with President Joe Biden in San Francisco on Wednesday. A red carpet has been rolled out for Xi by obsequious California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who seems to increasingly view the Chinese tyrant as a mentor and senior partner, positioning himself as even more China-friendly than Biden. After years of insisting nothing could be done about its chronic vagrancy problems, San Francisco made its homeless disappear overnight so the city would look presentable for Xi’s arrival.
According to the Washington Post’s sources, the administration’s goal is to put together a trade pact that can be sold as a victory against China’s growing economic clout and defuse anticipated campaign attacks from Republican candidates in 2024, especially former President Donald Trump, who ran effectively against the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in 2016 and will probably hammer Biden as being too soft on China.
The Biden administration thought it had solved its labor problems by negotiating a new deal that did not include the features unions found so objectionable in 2016 – but in the last few weeks, Biden’s team discovered there was still a massive and seemingly intractable obstacle, namely the push to make developing nations meet American workplace and environmental standards.
Exasperated administration officials told the Washington Post it is “difficult to convince poorer Asian countries to agree to the kind of worker standards sought by the U.S. labor movement that Biden has prided himself on championing.”
According to these sources, the administration was warned months ago that many of the nations it is courting for IPEF are “not on board” with the extremely expensive labor and environmental standards envisioned for the agreement but decided to move ahead anyway.
“We are on track to achieve meaningful progress and lay the foundation for a new framework for regional economic cooperation,” a spokesman for the White House National Security Council said in a statement on Sunday.
“The question here, as it was under Obama, is if U.S. foreign policy has meaningful regard for workers [sic]rights, or is it just we want to increase cooperation with Vietnam hoping to pull Vietnam further away from China?” grumbled former Communications Workers of America president Larry Cohen.
The Washington Post did not dwell on it, but China has been making strides with developing nations by promising its partnership does not come with Western human rights demands, implicitly including the push for LGBTQIA++ rights that is unwelcome in much of the “Global South.”
To put it bluntly, China uses slave labor, wantonly destroys ecosystems in the pursuit of its industrial goals, and grants few political or legal liberties to its population. Beijing is not going to hassle anyone else about their workplace standards or environmental regulations.
Another surprise twist to the APEC meeting is the Israel-Hamas war, which has roiled member states with Muslim governments or sizable Muslim minorities. A prime example is Indonesia, the largest Muslim-majority country in the world by population.
Indonesia happens to have the world’s most abundant supply of nickel, a metal used in electric vehicle (EV) batteries. Outgoing Indonesian President Joko Widodo met with Biden at the White House on Monday to discuss a bilateral minerals partnership – although this deal, too, is reportedly complicated by U.S. insistence on workplace and environmental standards that Indonesia finds onerous. Indonesia’s nickel mining operations are notoriously hard on the local environment and they are a severe threat to indigenous tribes.
Agence France-Presse (AFP) on Monday said the vision of “robust trade” uniting the Pacific Rim is over and the Biden administration is modestly hoping for a “limited economic pact” that will hold APEC nations together in defense of sanctions against China, plus perhaps a meeting with Xi that signals the Chinese value stability over confrontation.
“Even countries in the region who are extraordinarily worried about China’s increasing aggression still have deep economic inter-linkages with China and at the margin would vastly prefer a stable U.S.-China relationship to an unstable one,” Jude Blanchette of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) told AFP.
Speaking of stability, one APEC member who will not be present in San Francisco is Russian President Vladimir Putin. Russia will be represented at the summit by Deputy Prime Minister Alexei Overchuk, the highest-ranking Russian official to visit the United States since Putin launched his brutal invasion of Ukraine.
Nikkei Asia set low expectations for the San Francisco APEC meeting and IPEF deal on Monday, judging the Biden administration to be “out of step” with the priorities of key APEC members – who are not nearly as averse to doing business with Xi Jinping’s ugly dictatorship as U.S. policymakers would like.
Nikkei Asia expected little to come out of IPEF negotiations except “minor progress on matters like customs facilitation” and more proposals for “clean energy financing in Asia.” In this pessimistic analysis, the Biden administration has given up on pushing for “high-standard rules of the road in the digital economy,” and is mostly just trying to convince prospective IPEF partners to nudge their workplace standards up a little, so American labor unions do not complain about having to meet far more expensive standards than overseas competitors.
“Public- and private-sector leaders from Asia will be looking to make deals and create more growth. They do not want to see the region’s optimistic agenda of trade and investment liberalization further subordinated to Washington’s pessimistic geopolitical rivalry with China, or to U.S. domestic political priorities tied to the looming 2024 election contest,” Nikkei Asia concluded.
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