Australia’s Interests in East Asia’s Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership

The interest in the TPP was to keep the United States productively engaged in the region and to further rule-making and liberalisation amongst the TPP members. [...] The conclusion of RCEP took on still greater importance and urgency as a ballast against the rising protectionism globally and trade war between the United States and China in the latter half of the 2010s. [...] The strong support for multilateralism was reflected in the leadership at the Cairns Group 5 and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, for example, that complemented the GATT and later the World Trade Organization (WTO). [...] The interest in the TPP was to keep the United States productively engaged in the region and to further rule-making and liberalisation amongst the TPP members. [...] Some ambivalence towards ASEAN in the Australian government’s economic and security strategy was a product of the difficulty of the Australian government engaging ASEAN as a collective and the slow pace of the consensus- driven decision-making process.