US opens regional trade gambit in Asia

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http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China_Business/MG30Cb01.html

owards the end of her five-day visit to Asia that revealed new strategic thinking on several foreign policy indicators, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton this week delivered a path-breaking speech on economic diplomacy in Hong Kong. Grandly titled as "Principles for Prosperity in the Asia-Pacific", it purported to place the United States in the cockpit to drive the agenda of regional economic integration that is distinct from what China has been attempting under its own leadership banner.

Employing the language of economic rationality and avoidance of wasteful costs, Clinton criticized "a hodgepodge of inconsistent and partial bilateral agreements which may lower tariffs, but which also create new inefficiencies". Taking to task the over 100 bilateral trade pacts signed by Asian states in less than a decade, she beckoned towards "true regional integration" and a


"genuine free trade area of the Asia-Pacific".

The strategic undercurrent of these pronouncements is a reality that the US' export-oriented businesses are feeling the pinch of being left out of the growing sphere of intra-Asian trade, with China as the center of the wheel. The possibility that American businesses - spearheads tasked by President Barack Obama to generate new export revenues to bolster the sputtering US economy - could be left out of the Asian pie as preferential trade agreements (PTAs) and bilateral deals proliferate is a long-term apparition that haunts geo-economic planning in Washington.

Clinton's emphatic assertion in the Hong Kong speech that the US is a "resident economic power in Asia" is an indication that the Obama administration aims to use its formal resumption this November of leadership of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum to stage a comeback into a regional field that is centering and shaping around China.