Global Impact: What do the US midterms mean for Joe Biden’s already shaky anti-China partnerships?

Political events in China and America have given rise to new power dynamics, with the 20th Communist Party congress solidifying the policies of President Xi Jinping, and a midterm election further muddying the already chaotic political waters in the United States.

The austere choreography of Beijing’s twice-a-decade leadership reshuffle contrasted with the bruising political campaigns of the US midterms, which have yet to reveal how much power Republicans will have starting in January and what that will mean for President Joe Biden’s China policy or Indo-Pacific Strategy.

While the world more or less knows what to expect from Beijing, those with a stake in the success or failure of Biden’s effort to build a strategic environment “that makes it tough for China” will be watching closely for indications that the new US political landscape will undermine it.

With that in mind, now might be a good time to take stock of the alliances and partnerships that Biden has built or bolstered during his first two years in office, a network of overlapping groups and policies so sprawling that they sometimes come into conflict with each other.

One of the most recent successes on this front was Canada’s decision to join Biden’s Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF), an initiative that was initially portrayed by some as a poor substitute for the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership and came under attack for its lack of a market-access component.

After a more tenuous approach to countering Beijing compared with Washington, Ottawa has taken more pointed steps that align with the Biden administration’s efforts to chip away at China’s dominance in the production of key industrial materials needed to manufacture electric vehicles and other products that are essential to meeting the world’s carbon-reduction targets.

Just this month, for example, Canada’s government ordered three Chinese companies to divest from a handful of lithium miners based in the country, after introducing tougher rules on foreign investments in the nation’s critical minerals sectors. Days later, Canadian Foreign Minister Melanie Joly accused China of adopting an “increasingly disruptive” stance on the world stage as she referenced her government’s eagerly awaited Indo-Pacific strategy.

Biden has also drawn closer to the European Union through the US-EU Trade and Technology Council, established last year in a bid to reduce its members’ shared reliance on China’s manufacturing juggernaut, while strengthening their respective domestic supply chains involving strategic technologies.