NEGOTIATIONS on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), an ambitious trade agreement linking America, Japan and ten other countries—together accounting for 40% of global GDP—have missed so many deadlines that one more may not seem to matter. But talks are reaching a point of no return. Without an agreement in the next few weeks there will not be enough time to complete the TPP before America is embroiled in a presidential election campaign, and progress will be impossible until 2017. American diplomats, however, insist the deal is on track. They sometimes seem to be trying to convince themselves that an aim that has become a linchpin of American strategy is still achievable.

Their nervousness has been heightened by the recent embarrassment over the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), a new, China-led multilateral development-finance institution. A number of close American allies have applied to become founding shareholders, ignoring American entreaties to shun it as a threat to global standards. After that setback, America needs the TPP to succeed more than ever. It may well do so. But the most recent round of TPP talks, in Hawaii, appears to have ended with some important disagreements still unresolved.

This is not surprising. The TPP is to be a “21st-century” agreement, involving contentious reforms in areas such as intellectual property, the treatment of state-owned companies and environmental and labour standards. It includes economies at very different stages of development—from Peru and Vietnam to America and Australia. And even on 20th-century issues of import tariffs and market access, big differences remain between the two biggest economies in the TPP, America and Japan. In both agriculture and carmaking, America is demanding concessions that Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, will find politically difficult.

The biggest problems, however, may be at home in Washington, DC. The 11 other countries will be loth to show their final position until the Obama administration has “fast-track” Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) from Congress. Without TPA, Congress could unpick any agreement clause by clause rather than have to pass or reject it as a whole. And securing TPA is far from certain. The pact faces criticism from right-wing Republicans as well as from many Democrats. Paul Krugman, an economics Nobel laureate turned New York Times columnist, has called the economic case for the TPP “weak”. In February he wrote that if it does not happen it will be “no big deal”.

Mr Krugman is wrong there. Failure to complete it would be a terrible blow to American interests, for a number of reasons. Trade liberalisation itself is of course one. With prospects of a global agreement at the World Trade Organisation vanishing, America’s hopes lie in the TPP and the more distant Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with Europe. In his state-of-the-union speech to Congress in January, Barack Obama dwelt on “the world’s fastest-growing region”, ie, Asia and the Pacific.

The TPP has also become central to America’s most important alliance in Asia, with Japan. Concluding it would show that the two countries can overcome the trade irritants that have always tested the relationship. It is also seen as a vital part of Mr Abe’s strategy to shake the Japanese economy out of its prolonged torpor, in part by forcing structural reform upon it. This week Mr Obama confirmed an invitation to Mr Abe to the White House on April 28th. Mr Abe will also make a speech to Congress. But an inability to conclude the TPP, combined with renewed difficulties over moving a controversial American marine base on the southern Japanese island of Okinawa, could make the inevitable professions of eternal friendship ring a little hollow.

More broadly, so would another central boast of Mr Obama’s diplomacy, the “pivot” or “rebalancing” of American interests towards Asia. Diplomatically, this has always looked a little perfunctory, as crises in the Middle East and Europe have distracted America. The military component has so far not seemed very significant. And so more and more emphasis has been placed on the economic element—the TPP. Having advertised it as a symbol of their country’s enduring role as a regional leader, Americans can hardly complain if other countries choose to interpret it that way.

Yet when Mr Obama made his pitch in his state-of-the-union speech for support for TPA, he did not make the argument as one about global trade, the Japanese alliance or “rebalancing” to Asia. Rather, he argued it was needed to protect the interests of American workers and businesses against strategic competition from China, which, he said, wants to “set the rules” in the region.

China is at present excluded from TPP, but is engaged in talks with 15 other countries, including the ten members of the Association of South-East Asian Nations, as well as India and Japan, on what looks like a rival trade agreement, known as the RCEP. China has long suspected that the TPP is designed to keep it out—one part of an American policy of containment. Why, for example, its scholars ask, is Vietnam included? Its economy, too, is lacking in transparency and distorted by state-owned industry.

The zero-sum illusion

So the struggle to complete trade agreements seems to have become yet another area of strategic competition between America and China as they tussle for regional influence. As with the AIIB fiasco, this is unwarranted: both countries would gain from the boost to the global economy that the TPP and RCEP would provide. And China is free to join the TPP if it accepts its standards, which it has not ruled out. The dream is that, in the end, the overlapping trade pacts will merge in a broad free-trade area including both America and China—under American-style rules. So each should be cheering the other’s efforts on. Failure to complete the TPP would be a serious defeat for American diplomacy for many reasons. Portraying it as a way of countering China risks adding an unnecessary one: that it would look like a Chinese victory.