With U.S. and Chinese officials making their final preparations for President Joe Biden’s meeting with Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen sat down with the communist regime’s top economic official.

“We do not seek to decouple our economy from China’s,” Yellen said in San Francisco, where Xi and Biden will attend the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit this week. “Both countries jointly stated that we welcome the objective of a healthy economic relationship that provides a level playing field for companies and workers in both countries and benefits the two peoples.”

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Biden and Xi will not agree on “a long list of outcomes or deliverables” on trade or other issues, U.S. officials have acknowledged, given the acrimonious relationship between the two rival powers. Surrounded by allies and partners from Canada to Singapore, the APEC summit might seem like a natural opportunity to unveil agreements — especially under the auspices of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, the Biden team’s touted alternative to traditional trade agreements — that would give Xi a first-hand glimpse of American economic clout in the region. Yet that won’t really happen, either.

“Trade deals are not a priority for the administration,” Massachusetts Rep. Jake Auchincloss, a Democratic member of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. “I wish they were. I think trade and investment is an important element of economic competition with China.”

U.S. allies and partners around the world would agree. Biden’s team, likewise, identified “a strong foundation of close economic integration” as a core component of their Indo-Pacific strategy. Yet Biden has hesitated to eliminate tariffs that former president Donald Trump imposed on European allies. And U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai’s team has balked at brokering deals that expand traditional “market access” to foreign businesses, even in cases, such as Taiwan, that would find bipartisan congressional support.

“This administration believes that the central pillar of their foreign policy is aligning more closely with allies and partners,” American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Zack Cooper, an expert in U.S. alliance relations in the Indo-Pacific, told the Washington Examiner. "The challenge they have is that what allies and partners want most is not just rhetorical support or U.S. security commitments, but sustained U.S. economic engagement. And the best way to guarantee that is through market access to the U.S. economy, and the United States is not offering that.”

White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said as much in a landmark speech on Biden’s so-called “foreign policy for the middle class.” That slogan, derived from a study of “how Americans perceive and experience the economic effects of U.S. foreign policy” that Sullivan co-authored during Donald Trump’s presidency, referred in part to his aversion to the trade agreements that Trump denounced during his 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton.

“American manufacturing communities were hollowed out while cutting-edge industries moved to metropolitan areas,” Sullivan said in April. “Asking what our trade policy is now—narrowly framed as plans to reduce tariffs further—is simply the wrong question. The right question is: how does trade fit into our international economic policy, and what problems is it seeking to solve?”

For many American analysts and foreign observers alike, Sullivan’s speech couldn’t hide the political incentives powering the administration’s decision-making.

“The U.S are playing the trade game in a very destructive way and [a way] that even undercuts the overall message of U.S. foreign policy,” Germany’s Reinhard Butikofer, the chairman of the China delegation in the European Parliament, told the Washington Examiner. “I guess the simple logic of all of that is, Biden thinks [that] without pursuing such a protectionist trade policy, chances are, he will lose Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania and [other] states he needs to win.”

If that approach offers political protection heading into the 2024 election cycle, it nonetheless carries a strategic risk, from the perspective of policymakers who agree with Biden’s overarching theory that the U.S. needs allies to win a geo-economic competition with China.

“If the United States wants to continue to be the keystone of the international-rules based order, if it wants to continue to demonstrate to the world that American hegemony creates peace and prosperity, then we need to show the Global South that with trade and investment ties that materially improve their citizens lives,” Auchincloss said. So there needs to be — not just the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework — it needs to be more than just sort of shared talking points. There need to be trade and investment deliverables.”

Sullivan allowed the administration did “intend to pursue modern trade agreements,” but signaled they would “focus on those problems—and solving those problems” through IPEF. That initiative is a vehicle for establishing a supply chain agreement “that can help governments and companies quickly respond to disruptions,” as Manak put it in a recent paper, and regulations covering labor and environmental standards, and digital trade rules.

For Auchincloss, such standards — and the web of geo-economic relationships that go along with them — are analogous to an “operating system” on a smartphone.

“To the extent that we have deep and interconnected relationships with other countries…it’s going to expand our leverage relative to the People's Republic of China,” said Auchincloss. “We have a lot of advantages going into this competition, a lot of advantages. But if we allow trade and investment to atrophy with the Global South, while China is building them power plants, then they're gonna gain the upper hand in an important dimension of it.”

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The IPEF talks also have hit some snags. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) announced last week that Biden’s team is “suspending negotiations on aspects of the IPEF digital text,” a decision she applauded as a blow to nefarious “Big Tech interests.” It’s a reversal for a U.S. trade negotiating team that had assured allies they would “move as quickly as we can,” as Tai’s deputy said in January, even if the administration is expected to have more success “on boosting cooperation on de-carbonization efforts and to combat corruption and tax evasion,” according to Reuters.

“They're doing their best…to present the progress on IPEF as a breakthrough at APEC,” said Cooper. “In my interactions with foreign officials, no one is particularly excited.”