There was much irony in the fact that Peru this year came to host the recent annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum.

APEC began life as the 1970s brainchild of some anti-communist Japanese and Australian National University academics. They wanted a trade bloc that would encourage Japan to see its future in the Pacific rather than look west to communist China and the Soviet Union. But to prove the Pacific orientation they had to include Peru and some other distant Latin American nations of little global economic importance, while nearby China, now so important to the Japanese and Australian economies, was deliberately excluded.

The Latin Americans continue as members. But APEC, which has dropped any pretense of trying to be a free trade bloc, now has to include Beijing to try to give its annual talk-fests some kind of meaning and status. Even more ironically, APEC now has to pay serious attention to China's proposed Asia-Pacific trade bloc, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, at the very moment that the U.S.-proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, designed as an anti-China successor to APEC but with free trade teeth, begins to implode.