Former Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislator Julian Kuo (郭正亮) recently appeared on a political talk show in which he said that no country in the world has an inkling of how the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF) works. If the goal is not to provide market access or tariff reductions, Asian countries would have no incentive to conduct business with the US, he said.
Kuo’s conclusion was that most East Asian countries might be humoring the US, and that the IPEF would end up as “all talk and no action.”
The IPEF has been on the table for some time. In