As another fruitless round of China-US talks to avert a trade war wrapped up in Washington on August 23, foreign officials were arriving in the US capital for a potentially far more consequential meeting the next day. The occasion was an unusual trilateral forum that brings together trade officials from the US, EU and Japan.

Their mission: to combat the allegedly unfair trading practices by unspecified “third countries”.

When US trade representative Robert Lighthizer and his EU and Japanese counterparts announced their initiative on the sidelines of last December’s World Trade Organization meeting in Buenos Aires, they did not single out any one country for fostering allegedly “unfair competitive conditions caused by large market-distorting subsidies and state-owned enterprises, forced technology transfer and local content requirements”.