America’s leadership in regional economic affairs languished. There was a sense of exclusion from the various East Asian initiatives, and a drift that now requires invigoration of purpose and strategy towards the huge changes that continue to re-shape the Asian economy.

Gordon warns, with good reason, that the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), currently all the rage within trade policy circles within the beltway in Washington, is not likely, any time soon, to provide the vision or the narrative that will re-establish a sense of direction, purpose and leadership for America in the Asian economy. For one thing, US Congress is unlikely to ratify any meaningful agreement. And, in any case ‘(f)or a United States that almost single-handedly launched both the global GATT and then the WTO,’ Gordon argues, a ‘Trans-Pacific Partnership’ is quite a comedown. All the more so when, if the WTO’s Doha Round were completed, its ‘most-favoured-nation’ clause would render moot most of the preferential trade agreements now cluttering world trade, and simultaneously kick-start global trade growth. But the TPP effort—representing Australia, Brunei, Chile, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the US and Vietnam—now tops Washington’s trade agenda. Singapore and Australia have long been important American trade partners, but as a group the TPP is no heavyweight. Its merchandise trade with the United States last year was US$110 billion, while total American exports and imports combined represented US$2.6 trillion. The TPP, in other words, accounted for just 4.2 per cent of America’s trade, and no partner is even in the top 10 of US export markets.’

Gordon urges that pursuit of markets in developing Asia and elsewhere requires continued global focus. If ‘Mr. Obama genuinely hopes to achieve his goal of doubling of US exports, he will reassert America’s world trade leadership, and take the necessary steps to complete the Doha global trade Round.’ And that’s a fair point. The just-released US National Security Strategy Report, with its reference to completing an ‘ambitious and balanced’ Round, is a small but good omen.

Free trade agreements of the TPP kind have been described as trade policy strategies for the 1950s or 1960s. The character of the international economy and its openness has changed vastly since then. America’s full participation in the complex integration of goods and services trade, investment and production that Asia’s success in the global market has been built on will not be driven by arrangements that tinker with a small tariff here or a market access arrangement there for a few preferred players.

Hopefully Mr Obama’s visit will help to define a new vision for US economic engagement with Asia on the rise, one that seeks nothing less than a single market in the Asia Pacific economy and begins to set milestones along the way to making progress with it in his lifetime. Arrangements such as TPP may play a small role in that, but it will be a trivial role alongside the pay-off from global strategies and leading the way on reforms that get rid of the structural impediments in national markets (lack of infrastructure and market restricting regulations) to doing business globally. APEC, which the US is hosting in 2011, offers an effective vehicle for getting to work on this agenda.

President Obama will also find, in Jakarta and Canberra, strong support for deeper US engagement in dialogue on this economic agenda and on the political issues that it inevitably raises, in a framework that builds towards something like Australian Prime Minister Rudd’s Asia Pacific Community idea.