Faced with a new world where economic tools are increasingly weaponised and trade rules disregarded, the 12 member economies of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) met virtually for the Tenth Commission meeting in June.
Signed in 2018, the partnership spans the Indo-Pacific, Latin America, Europe, and North America and has driven economic growth, with intra-bloc trade reaching US$618 billion in 2024. Looking to preserve this momentum, members resolved during the meeting “to ensure that the CPTPP continues to play a key role in fostering economic integration.” Translating that resolve into action will require members to navigate two great powers willing to wield tariffs and leverage supply chain dependencies to pursue their interests.
Meeting this challenge would not be the first time the partnership’s members chose to adapt to a changing world, where great powers were renegotiating their global roles and the rules of engagement. When the United States abandoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the CPTPP emerged as a statement that strategic and economic agreements could be forged without Washington or Beijing. Now, the challenge is greater. To meet it, the CPTPP needs a mechanism to identify shared vulnerabilities, signal solidarity, and direct collective resources.
This necessity is well understood by members. In October 2025, China tightened its rare earth export controls, using its dominance in processing to assert its strategic interests and, in doing so, reminding the world that dependencies in global systems can quickly become leverage. CPTPP members responded. In November 2025, members recommended that officials begin strengthening supply chain resilience and establishing platforms to share information and coordinate responses to economic coercion.
In March, Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz in response to US attacks, causing major energy supply disruptions. While the US did not weaponise the choke point itself, its disregard for CPTPP members’ vulnerabilities and opportunistic push for partners to simply “buy oil from the United States of America” demonstrated its willingness to exploit systemic shocks for national gain. In June, CPTPP members instructed officials to accelerate their work toward supply chain resilience.
Putting the Pieces Together: Integrating Capital and Resources to Build Collective Resilience
The partnership’s combined capabilities and resources provide everything needed to implement this resilience mandate, enabling members either to endure coercion or to exact costs that outweigh its benefits. The CPTPP also links Latin America and the Indo-Pacific under one agreement, offering access to immense resources, technology, and capital. Representing roughly 15 per cent of global GDP and 580 million consumers, the partnership demonstrates how middle powers can build economically significant, rules-based trade architecture.
In critical minerals, members hold the chain end to end. Latin American members account for close to 40 per cent of global copper production and sit on substantial critical mineral deposits. Australia holds considerable reserves of its own and adds world-leading extraction capacity. Chile refines and exports nearly three-quarters of the world’s lithium carbonate, and Malaysia, Vietnam, and Australia are building out further midstream processing. Finally, Japan provides the advanced manufacturing base. Together, members hold enough inputs to effectively negotiate their interests with the great powers.
In energy, members can build effective and robust security. Canada and Mexico are major crude producers, with Canada holding the world’s fourth largest oil reserves. Australia, Malaysia, and Brunei are meaningful LNG exporters, with Australia the second largest globally. Singapore and Japan anchor downstream refining. The partnership can also drive the transition. Its critical minerals and processing capacity underpin the necessary technology, and Vietnam and Malaysia are emerging as hubs for manufacturing clean energy inputs. Across fossil fuels and clean energy, members can mitigate disruptions while shaping how new technologies are deployed.
Members also hold the capital to fund these chains. London, Singapore, and Tokyo sit among the world’s top ten financial centres. Combined with Australia’s AU$4.5 trillion superannuation pool, these centres give the partnership enough institutional capital to drive industry-shaping investment across regional value chains.
Capturing substantial components of critical supply chains provides members with more than trade. It provides the ability to resist coercion and reinforce rules. Great powers prefer bilateral deals because they confer disproportionate leverage, allowing them to withhold access, resources, or technology that smaller nations require. But a coalition of middle powers that collectively controls the inputs to essential supply chains is difficult to coerce.
Yet, in an era where state institutions act in lockstep with industry, whether to cooperate, compete, or coerce, simply possessing these assets and lowering trade barriers is no longer enough. Translating capacity into resilience requires members to know what partners hold, what vulnerabilities they face, and whom to call during disruptions. Members need to establish institutional mechanisms that actively build and secure the supply chains that guarantee growth and agency, as recommended in November 2025 and reaffirmed in June this year.
Using What Works: Learning From and Expanding on the IPEF
Lessons can be drawn from the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) mechanisms, which diagnose supply bottlenecks and mobilise collective action. Its Supply Chain Council identifies critical sectors and coordinates action plans across members, its Crisis Response Network provides a standing channel to share information and request assistance during disruptions, and its investment coordination tools incentivise capital toward supply chain gaps. In 2024, the IPEF Clean Economy Investor Forum alone convened the region’s largest investors around a pipeline of close to AU$50 billion in projects for investment facilitation. Together, these mechanisms do not simply lower barriers to cooperation; they operationalise it.
The CPTPP could deploy similar architecture to even greater effect for two reasons. First, unlike IPEF, it bridges Latin American resource holders directly with Indo-Pacific processing and manufacturing capacity. Second, whereas IPEF relies on a United States that has retreated from rules-based trade, the CPTPP is the most comprehensive grouping dedicated exclusively to middle-power interests.
The task now is to give the supply chain resilience and anti-coercion work real force. The supply chain workstream must focus on key sectors, starting with critical minerals and energy. The anti-coercion platform should map systemic exposures, coordinate sector-specific action plans, establish a crisis response network spanning both regions, and direct capital toward the extraction-to-processing links its members make possible. Faced with great powers determined to reshape global trade, middle powers need more than dialogue. They need tools to act.
Importantly, this architecture needs to be stood up urgently. The last review to make sure the CPTPP was fit for purpose took three years and ended with members agreeing to work toward supply chain resilience. June’s call for the work to accelerate shows that reforms must move faster. With economic coercion becoming routine, an imperfect mechanism that exists when the next shock lands beats a perfect one implemented too late. Architecture that is operating can adapt and strengthen with each crisis.
The CPTPP proves middle powers will not relegate rules-based trade to history. Costa Rica’s substantially concluded accession negotiations demonstrate that resolve today. Ongoing work toward Uruguay’s accession and preparatory talks with Indonesia, the Philippines, and the United Arab Emirates, combined with a growing list of applicants, show that it will endure. The membership has named supply chain resilience as its test. Delivering it requires more than new accessions and lowered barriers; it requires new mechanisms that act.
David Saultry is an independent consultant specialising in economic security and critical minerals, previously advising on US-China strategic competition at the Australian Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
This article is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.
