When US President Barack Obama sits down with Xi Jinping and other Pacific Rim leaders in Peru this weekend he may feel he is handing the Chinese leader the keys to the global economy.

For years Mr Obama’s efforts to hammer out the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade pact with Japan and 10 other countries that together account for 40 per cent of the world economy, have dominated discussions at gatherings such as this weekend’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. Along with mooted deals with the EU and others that excluded China, they represented his administration’s brazen push to erect a strategic ring of trade alliances to contain Beijing’s rise.

But Donald Trump’s presidential victory — and the antitrade rhetoric of a campaign catering to disgruntled blue-collar voters in rust belt states — have brought all that to an ignominious end. China is wasting no time in moving into the economic driver’s seat and pushing the US out of its role as the lead advocate of economic integration in the Asia-Pacific region.

Rather than Mr Obama’s TPP, the focus in Lima this week will be on Mr Xi’s ambitions for an even larger Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific, as well as for another Chinese-backed trade deal that has been a rival to the TPP.

At the heart of the Chinese leader’s pitch is a simple new reality for countries looking to strengthen economic bonds in the world’s fastest-growing region. “You can’t beat something with nothing and the Chinese are offering something,” says Adam Posen, head of the Washington-based Peterson Institute for International Economics.

China’s proposed FTAAP would stretch from Latin America to Indochina and include the US. But it is years away from becoming reality. Leaders and ministers gathering in Lima this week from Apec’s 21 member countries are only being presented with a China-initiated study on how it might come to fruition and considering how to proceed.

For years the US hope was that it could get ahead of China by offering the TPP as the main building block of an FTAAP. All 12 TPP members belong to APEC.

But China is proposing another rival to the TPP that is closer to completion — the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. Launched in 2013 by the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in a bid to merge the group’s trade deals with China, India, Japan and others, it is now a Beijing-led project. Importantly, it also excludes the US.

Washington and others have long viewed the RCEP as a bastard cousin of the TPP. Although RCEP includes seven of the 12 TPP countries, most experts see it as an old-fashioned deal likely to deliver only a modest reduction in tariffs and trade barriers. It contains none of the ambitious rules covering areas such as the conduct of state-owned enterprises or cross-border data flows that the TPP does.

But with Mr Trump’s election, “countries have realised very quickly that [RCEP] is the only major Asia trade deal on the table”, says Joshua Meltzer, a former Australian diplomat now at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Not everyone is willing to give up on the TPP. Some governments are considering concluding a TPP without the US, something leaders will discuss on the sidelines of the Apec summit.

Japan, New Zealand and others have been moving to ratify the TPP, which under its current rules cannot come into force without US approval.

You can’t beat something with nothing and the Chinese are offering something

After a meeting with Japan’s Shinzo Abe this week, Malaysia’s Najib Razak told reporters he hoped “the strategic importance of the TPP will be recognised by the incoming [US] administration” and that Mr Trump might eventually sign on.

But few believe that volte-face will happen, and distrust of the US is also emerging. One senior official from a TPP country says the US failure to ratify the deal raised questions about any future negotiations with Washington. “It is very hard to say that there will be the same level of trust in the US after this.”

The consequences of the looming turnround in US trade policy are broader still.

Besides the TPP, Mr Trump’s election bodes badly for an EU-US deal — the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) — already facing stiff political headwinds in Europe. It also is likely to mean the death of negotiations to liberalise the global trade in services and environmental goods.

“The world does need US leadership. Without a TPP or a TTIP … it doesn’t look like western democracies are all that capable of pursuing trade agreements,” says Dan Ikenson, director of trade research at the libertarian Cato Institute.

Even if that leaves a vacuum for China to fill, Trump backers seem nonplussed.

For too long the focus of US trade policy has been geopolitical rather than economic, they argue. The result has been the rust belt deindustrialisation that laid the ground for Mr Trump’s rise, they contend, and more important than hatching new agreements is enforcing the rules of existing ones or renegotiating them to benefit America.

“The US has been positioning itself to be the good guy of trade and open markets since World War Two. I think now the US needs to discuss how it has been dealt serious disadvantages,” says Phil English, a former Republican congressman from Pennsylvania who served as a Trump delegate to July’s Republican convention. “I think this is going to be liberating.”