It’s tough being a global trading power tussling for geoeconomic pre-eminence when you can’t sign binding trade deals, but that’s more or less where the Biden White House finds itself. A decade ago, when the Obama administration was driving forward the Trans-Pacific Partnership regional mega-deal, you’d have been laughed out of Washington for predicting that, the US having abandoned the agreement, Beijing would apply to join a pact originally designed to counter China’s economic heft. But the toxicity of formal trade agreements on Capitol Hill, which predates President Joe Biden and even Donald Trump, and among Biden’s voter base has in effect shut off one of the US’s main vehicles for projecting economic influence.Searching for an Asia-Pacific alternative to what is now the CPTPP (prefixed with “Comprehensive and Progressive”), the US last year announced the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, a series of deals with 13 other nations.

Its first results, of an initiative on supply chains, were unveiled nearly two weeks ago. They were unimpressive. The US announcement was a mass of abstract verbiage with a tangle of subclauses festooned with adjectives and adverbs layered two or three deep. It pledged, among other things, to “ensure that workers and the businesses, especially micro-, small-, and medium-sized enterprises, in the economies of IPEF partners benefit from resilient, robust, and efficient supply chains by identifying disruptions or potential disruptions and responding promptly, effectively, and, where possible, collectively”. All clear now?

In the time-honoured tradition of talking shops reproducing themselves, the announcement has no binding mechanisms but instead sets up a new Supply Chain Council, a Supply Chain Crisis Response Network and — this being the Biden administration — a Labor Rights Advisory Board.