Self-benefit at heart of 'Indo-Pacific' framework

The serious divergences in key fields exposed by the first in-person ministerial meeting under the "Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity" that the Joe Biden administration hosted in Los Angeles last week indicates the mechanism aimed at containing China will continue to be a work in progress.

US President Joe Biden proposed the IPEF during his trip to Japan in May to exclude China from the Asia-Pacific in terms of trade, labor and digital standards, clean energy, supply chains, tax and anti-graft. It is the love-child of the America-first strategy of the former Donald Trump administration and the US-should-dominate-global-business strategy proposed by Biden when he served as vice-president more than five years ago.

Putting old, adulterated wines in a new bottle apparently cannot attract new customers. Although representatives from 13 countries attended the two-day meeting, their presence, instead of showing the multilateral support to the IPEF, only served to demonstrate how impossible it is for the initiative to become the catch-all it is claimed to be.