Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership: A fitting welcome for a Biden presidency

As the United States prepares for a transition from the Trump presidency to a Biden administration, many around the world speculate about the future of America’s many wars abroad.

Will the Iranians be invited back to the negotiating table? Will Syria get any closer to peace? How will Riyadh react to a Biden presidency? And perhaps most of all: what will happen to the peace process in Afghanistan? But there is one question that will not only trump all these (no pun intended), it will also help shape the response to all other questions.

What will Biden do about China?

One of the challenges that both the Biden administration faces, and observers of global events struggle with, is the vastly altered nature of the world and how it works. For many of us, the prospects of a Biden presidency signal a return to some kind of globalised, neoliberal normalcy. Newsflash: unless Uncle Joe is planning on driving into the White House in a time travel machine, there is no “going back” in time. No reversal of the events of the last four years. And no free pass for whatever transpired during the eight years that Biden was Vice President of the United States, otherwise known as the Obama years.

Nothing offers as stark a reminder of the dramatically brave new world into which President-elect Joe Biden will ascend into the most powerful office on the planet than the timing and substance of the news from Vietnam this past weekend, where the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) was signed by its fifteen founding members.

Nothing offers as stark a reminder of the dramatically brave new world into which President-elect Joe Biden will ascend into the most powerful office on the planet than the timing and substance of the news from Vietnam this past weekend, where the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) was signed by its fifteen founding members.

Mosharraf  Zaidi

Despite the complications posed by COVID-19, Australia, China, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea came together with the 10 member states of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) to form the RCEP—the world’s largest trading bloc.

This signing has come less than two months before the transfer of power in the United States, less than one year after India ended its participation in the negotiations for the RCEP, and less than four years after President Trump made good on his election promise of a swift exit from the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), the long negotiated trade deal that established a trading bloc around China (and excluding China).

As many wistfully await a Biden era that ushers in a renewal of a pre-Trump normalcy, they will need to consider just how dramatically the world has changed. Seven of the countries that were originally part of the TPP have signed up to be members of the RCEP: Australia, Brunei, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore and Vietnam. None can be considered partisan to China. And yet, all 15 of the RCEP members are enthusiastically diving into the new trading bloc.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the economic destruction it has wrought was supposed to have caused a doubling down of protectionism and populist rhetoric around it. The signing of the RCEP may not mean a return to multilateralism or neoliberalism, but it does signal the recognition among many nations’ public policy elites that the fastest way to renew GDP growth may just be to open the floodgates of trade across borders.

Will the mainstream political discourse in the US be able to process how quickly COVID-19 and the Trumpian trade playbook have come together to forge a China-centred alliance like RCEP? It is unlikely.

For starters, a centrist American administration will be hamstrung by its need to placate not one, but two political bases: progressive and conservative. President-elect Biden is unlikely to buck his own centrist nature, much less aggravate an electorate that not only voted in large numbers for Donald Trump, but also returned a largely unchanged senate to the US Congress.

Even if Biden decided to counter the growing post COVID-19 Chinese influence on the global economy, he would have a tough time starting in the past. American progressives were strongly against the TPP to begin with, with Bernie Sanders calling it a “disastrous trade agreement designed to protect the interests of the largest multi-national corporations at the expense of workers, consumers, the environment and the foundations of American democracy”.

Biden’s own words on China are a reflection of his acute understanding of the delicate equilibrium that an adult in the Oval Office needs to demonstrate within the United States. In his Foreign Affairs article earlier this year, he calls for the need for the US “to get tough with China” even as he recognizes the need for the United States to “seek to cooperate with Beijing on issues where our interests converge”. The political maturity to be able to contain two divergent instincts may not be enough though, because in the same article, Biden writes: “Who writes the rules that govern trade? The United States, not China, should be leading that effort.”

With the RCEP now signed, and the very slim possibility of renewed American participation in the CPTPP (the residual bloc from the erstwhile TPP), how will the US lead in designing the global trade order, especially in the aftermath of COVID-19 and Brexit? The short answer is that it will not.

At WEF’s Davos meeting in January 2017, President Xi Jinping formally announced China’s arrival on the world stage as a legitimate claimant of the mantle of global leader for free trade and multilateral cooperation.

The four years of Donald Trump saw China increasingly present itself as a dependable guardian of an international order that, quite ironically, Joe Biden and his many colleagues in both the Republican and Democratic parties in the US helped build over the last nearly five decades he has spent in politics.

How will the Biden Administration take back the mantle of leader of the rules-based world order whilst maintaining the peace at home, both with Republicans that expect him to be tough on China, and with Democrats that expect him not to cave into the “free trade” narratives that the progressive wing of the party abhors?

It will be a tricky balance, and one that is as likely to inform questions about America’s appetite for continued military engagements abroad, as any other.

- Mosharraf Zaidi is a columnist and policy analyst. He works for the policy think tank, Tabadlab.
Twitter: @mosharrafzaidi​