Can APEC’s Spirit Of Cooperation Survive Geopolitical Shifts Ahead?

After two days of meetings in Lima that rarely ventured beyond platitudes in discussing the strategies of the region's major economies, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum wrapped up Saturday with a spirit of detente that many fear the annual summit may not see again for four years.

The 21 leaders from economies bordering the Pacific, including US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping, descended on Peru this week at a time when America's incoming president, Donald Trump, has vowed to withdraw the US from its leadership of a global free trade agenda. Few could help noting that Biden's late entrance to the traditional APEC family photo on Saturday lent itself to political metaphor, as the rest of the leaders prepared to pose onstage before looking around to find Biden missing.

They tittered for five awkward minutes before a seemingly dazed Biden emerged and took his place in the far back corner, standing between Thailand's 38-year-old Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra and Vietnam President Luong Cuong. Descending the stage, Biden briefly reached for Shinawatra's hand to steady himself. Chinese President Xi scored the best spot in the house, front and centre beside the host, Peruvian President Dina Boluarte.

He draped himself in the banner of globalisation this week, inaugurating a massive $1.3 billion megaport in Peru that promises to become South America's biggest shipping hub and using his speeches to reject protectionism.

In Xi's summit address, delivered by one of his ministers, the Chinese leader urged APEC members to "tear down the walls impeding the flow of trade", and criticised tariffs -- which Trump threatens to levy on Chinese imports -- as "going back in history". For the annual photo-op, leaders all wore bark-hued wool scarves from Peru -- in the APEC tradition of posing in some garb representative of the host country. While conference organisers typically position leaders in alphabetical order for the family photo, arrangements have varied over the years.

Reporters shouted questions as Biden left the stage on Friday, asking how he felt about this being his last APEC summit -- and one of his last major global events as president. Biden had hoped that APEC -- along with the Group of 20 summit in Rio de Janeiro, where he heads on Sunday -- would have capped his decade-long political career with a flurry of productive diplomacy and swaggering proclamations of America's force on the world stage.

But with his party's stinging defeat in the US election and the future of the US-China rivalry uncertain, there was little he could accomplish in Lima. He sought to cement alliances that could be upended by a Trump administration. He expressed concern to the leaders of South Korea and Japan about what he called "dangerous and destabilising cooperation" between North Korea and Russia.

Later on Saturday, Biden and Xi sat down at a long table later Saturday for their third and final meeting of Biden's tenure. Xi told Biden that his nation was "ready to work with a new administration to maintain communication". Biden also struck a conciliatory tone, saying that such in-person talks helped "ensure that competition between our two countries will not veer into conflict".