The imprudence of former President Donald Trump’s 2017 decision to opt out of the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact– and the subsequent decision by President Joe Biden not to return to it – is showing up yet again in the dismal performance of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF), which Washington launched in 2022 to try to replace the TPP and draw trade away from China.
Although business organizations in the United States have described the IPEF as meaningless and toothless, the Biden administration has argued that other trade agreements and practices have led to deindustrialization in the US and resulted in lost jobs and decreased standards of living for workers.
On average, the 14 IPEF countries have all increased their trade dependency on China, not reduced it, receiving more than 30 percent of their manufactured imports from China and sending almost 20 percent of their exports in the opposite direction in 2021, according to research by the Washington, DC-based tank the Peterson International Institute for Economics. Since 2010, IPEF members increased their China share of imports by 40 percent, and share of exports by almost 45 percent, the Institute found…
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