APEC 2015 ended with a vow to combat terrorism, yet the Summit refused to be distracted from its true goal – economic development. In the coming years, the United States, China, and the Association of Southeast Nations must compromise if they truly want to invest in both regional peace and economic development.

A free-trade agreement for the Asia-Pacific would capitalize on the capabilities and the diversity of APEC countries. As broached by China in 1996, an open economy in the Asia-Pacific is a step toward common development, prosperity and progress for the whole region.

The free-trade deal seems more firmly rooted in politics than economics, lacking both fairness and transparency, and that doesn’t bode well for a harmonious world order.

For those who oppose the TPP, much as been made of the secret nature in which the treaty was negotiated. Walker Rowe summarizes some major sectors that will be affect by the treaty, and thus trying to influence a rather fractured and unpopular trade agreement.

Beijing and Washington need to do is think of ways to translate the important agreements reached at the top level into reality. Beyond grand declarations, the “new model” needs to utilize a broad-based policy-making network that involves cyber and climate experts.

While the U.S.-led Trans-Pacific Partnership has potential to split Asia Pacific, it could be used as a foundation for truly free trade, along with other free trade plans in the region.

Because existing trade terms mean 80% of TPP members’ exports to the U.S. are already duty-free while even a bigger percentage of China’s manufactured goods enjoy that status, the agreement’s bottom-line impact on trade is negligible for now. The deal is more about who gets to write the long-term rules of global governance, which for China is both a challenge and an opportunity to reshape its economy in the direction it was going anyway.

Open to insiders and restrictive to outsiders, as they lower trade barriers among member economies, regional FTAs tend to build higher trade barriers against non-member economies. Often tools for working around loopholes in the WTO, such regional agreements buck the trend toward globalization.

For China and the United States, a new type of economic and trade relationship with each other is in the best interest of the two major powers, and they should work towards this end. That will require Washington to view the new TTP through the lens of its best economic interests, and join China in creating the world’s largest free-trade zone by around 2030.

It is hard to avoid the U.S.-China bipolar narrative, although this over-simplistic analysis misses other measures of global power and insecurity. Xenia Wicket argues there is no single paramount power, but a variety of nodes of state and non-state actors.