IPEF is a dud, the latest in desperate and dangerous US China-bashing strategy. The IPEF (The Indo-Pacific Economic Framework) is the economic arm of the US’s hybrid Indo-Pacific Strategy against China. The AT article below argues that it is a dud out of the starting gate.
The Indo-Pacific Strategy is a rebranding of Obama’s original “Pivot to Asia”, the Obama-era grand strategy to encircle, choke off, prevent China’s rise, and to bring it down, or at least to heel. The original Pivot to Asia came with an articulated doctrine of kinetic war, AirSea Battle (modelled after AirLand Battle, the US/NATO doctrine of total war against the USSR & the Warsaw Pact), and a 7-year-formulated strategy of economic war, the Transpacific Partnership (TPP), engineered to exclude and eject China from the global economy.
This was China’s punishment for not becoming a comesticated, docile, subservient subaltern to the US Global Capitalist system (as had, for example, Japan, SK, Taiwan) and for not allowing itself to be privatized, asset-stripped, fragmented and neutered (like the USSR).
It was also repayment to China for pulling the US out of the economic catastrophe of 2008. By showing that it had the economic clout to rescue the US, it demonstrated that it was not going to collapse (as Gordon Chang had predicted every year since 2001). In fact, it demonstrated that it was the US system that was on life support. That was not how the story was supposed to go. The parochial, condescension towards China–“let’s exploit it until it collapses or becomes a totally capitalist stooge for us”–turned into “What have we unleashed?” and “How could we let this happen?”. This was when the daggers came out. How could the US tolerate the humiliation of being rescued by the inferior? ASB was quietly formulated, worked out, budgeted, promulgated, and then the Pivot was declared.
This refusal of China’s refusal to become subaltern was reframed in the mainstream West as China becoming an “authoritarian” and a “pacing threat” to the “rules-based international order”, i.e. “uppity” on a global scale. China’s ending of extreme poverty, China’s peaceful rise, China’s regional development assistance through the BRI, China’s thwarting of terrorism and separatism, China’s prevention of Covid catastrophe among its people, China’s support of UN multilateralism, China’s shift toward carbon neutrality, were all characterized as CPC authoritarianism–a return of “oriental despotism” and proof of Imperial Chinese ambition,
In short, by removing the Western capitalist leech from the Chinese host’s body, and developing–and even thriving–on its own terms–modeling the possibility of alternate forms of non-western development, China constituted an existential threat to the global western model of core-periphery imperial parasitism.
In inbred, hot-to-trot, “marxological” groups, and lefish, sheep-dogging pseudo-progressive circles–such as Jacobin–this challenge and refusal was framed as “Chinese Imperialism”, “Inter-imperial competition”, accompanied often by mind-bending/logic-defying portrayals of colonial lackeys, racist/separatist reactionaries, color revolutionaries/terrorists in HK and XJ as fighting against Chinese expansionist ambitions (in its own territory, no less!)
When Donald Trump was elected, he abandoned the TPP, despite Sec Def Ash Carter’s exhortation that it was as “important as an aircraft carrier”. This was due to his neo-mercantile instincts and worldview, and his belief that he could best allied foreign governments in bilateral agreements rather than an Obama-concocted generic FTA for the region.
Trump also waged economic war frontally using trade war in two Parts–Part I: sanctions, tariffs, to warm up; and Part II: the real demand that China restructure its economy and disable its public SOE’s–while resorting to medieval tactics such as kidnapping Huawei’s top financial executive to exert pressure–but it was all in vain. In fact, Part II of the trade war, the demand that China reform and restructure–was never even broached, as the Chinese stalled, then outmaneuvered the US to a standstill. As for Part I, sanctions and tariffs, they have largely blown back on the US with inflation and supply chain chaos and shortages, and the Biden administration is trying to find a face-saving way of lifting them–while still engaging in other contradictory frontal sanctions (like the Uighur slave labor act).
The academic-tech warfare component of this, the “China Initiative”–a McCarthyite targeting of Chinese and China-associated STEM academics to eject China from the global scientific knowledge commons, is also backfiring, as the Chinese who constitute a large part of the US cognitive labor force and whose brain drain has benefited the US technologically, scientifically, and economically, are simply returning to China or refusing to come at all.
Biden rehired the original architect of the Pivot to Asia, Kurt Campbell, as his Asia-Czar. Campbell brought in a bevy of White supremacist anti-China hawks from CNAS, the anti-China thinktank he founded as a braintrust and privvy war council for Obama. 18 neocon CNAS Hawks occupy all the top positions of the Biden administration, including Victoria Nuland and her ilk. He rebranded the Pivot as the Indo-Pacific Strategy, and reinstituted a TPP-lite, the IPEF to reassert US dominance in economic affairs in the pacific. This seems to be thin, rhetorical gruel, as the article below suggests.
As the US runs out of arrows in its economic quiver and continues to fire blanks geostrategically, it is more likely to engage in harsher rhetoric, fiercer infowar, and lawfare, to put more pressure on its “latticework” of partners/vassals, and more likely to instigate no-holds barred kinetic war, up to and including nuclear war. Expect also heightened oppression and austerity at home as it fights desperately to maintain its world view and supremacy.
Buckle up, everyone. The ride is only just beginning.
IPEF will be a hard sell in the Indo-Pacific
While China spearheads meaningful free trade efforts in the region, Biden’s IPEF has few tangible economic benefits to offer By MK BHADRAKUMAR
The Biden administration expects that the IPEF will serve as an important tool of the US in the country’s geopolitical and economic competition against China.
Along with the US, initial participants in the framework include major economies like Australia, India, Japan and South Korea, as well as developing countries, including Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam, and smaller nations like Brunei, New Zealand and Singapore.
Broadly, the IPEF bloc would provide an early warning system for supply-chain issues, encourage industries to decarbonize and offer US businesses reliable Asian partners outside China. In a nutshell, the US wants to boost its profile in Asia’s economic realm, where China is the dominant country.
The IPEF would include four different modules covering fair trade, supply chain resilience, infrastructure and decarbonization, tax and anti-corruption. With Monday’s kickoff, negotiations in each of these areas will soon ensue.
Each of the 13 participating countries will be allowed to choose in which of the four areas to pursue deals without having to commit to all of them. Parameters for the negotiations should be set by late June or early July, and the Biden administration hopes to wrap up any agreements within 12 to 18 months to then submit to each government for ratification.
In reality, the IPEF is a desperate move by the Biden administration to burnish its economic profile in Asia as a credible counterbalance to China. It is designed to project the US in the economic leadership of the Indo-Pacific region.
The goal is to make a splash in the Asia-Pacific region after the United States’ ignominious exit during the Donald Trump presidency from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which, ironically, was Washington’s brainchild in the first instance and former president Barack Obama’s signature trade agreement.
The IPEF is neither a “pact” nor a “deal,” as the Indian media seem to think. It is what it says – a loose framework of Asian countries that would provide an early warning system for supply-chain issues, encourage industries to decarbonize, and offer US businesses reliable regional partners outside China.
It will make no binding commitments regarding market access characteristic of trade deals or free-trade agreements (FTAs), because that would be a hard sell in the US, where protectionist sentiments are well entrenched. But it will provide for ambitious labor and environmental standards and create new guidelines for how data flows between countries.
A White House fact sheet comes straight to the point when it says, “IPEF will enable the United States and our allies to decide on rules of the road that ensure American workers, small businesses, and ranchers can compete in the Indo-Pacific.”
Under the IPEF, the Biden administration is trying to dominate the rules and standards of digital technologies like artificial intelligence and fifth-generation telecom (5G). But the rules of digital trade and technology that the US wants to promote are too “American,” and many countries in the region simply cannot meet the so-called high standards.
The US goal to isolate China from regional countries will make the implementation of IPEF rather problematic insofar as the framework serves US interests at the expense of regional countries by setting higher thresholds on digital economy, environmental protection and other fields in line with US economic policies.
Besides, countries within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations are in no mood to decouple from China, and the existing pattern of supply chain division has lasted a long time and has brought benefits to the countries of the Indo-Pacific.
Importantly, China is spearheading a comprehensive free trade effort in Asia, especially with the operationalization of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), whereas the IPEF has little to offer Asian economies by way of tangible economic benefits such as opening up more of the US market to Asian people. There are no market-access or tariff-reduction provisions in the framework, which lacks trade incentives that countries in the region desire. Above all, the IPEF may take years to take shape and China gets ample time to render it ineffective.
The Biden administration is unsure as of now whether to get the IPEF pact ratified by the US Congress, where it might meet sudden death. Put differently, a question mark needs to be put on the sustainability of the IPEF beyond 2024. The few countries in the Asia-Pacific region that have joined the IPEF will keep their fingers crossed.
Johnson Choi Biz 