The Agreement Relating to Supply Chain Resilience, the second IPEF pillar, was signed on November 14, 2023 and entered into force on February 24, 2024, thirty days after the fifth instrument of ratification was deposited. The United States is a full party and the State Department is the depositary, and no U.S. withdrawal has been announced as of June 2026. State's treaty records still list the IPEF agreements as in force. The withdrawal article lets a party notify withdrawal only after three years from entry into force, which puts the earliest notice date at February 24, 2027, with withdrawal taking effect six months after the Depositary receives the notice. A clean departure is therefore not yet legally available.
The agreement set up three governing bodies. The United States was elected at launch to chair the Supply Chain Council and the Labor Rights Advisory Board, while Korea chaired the Crisis Response Network. Australia took over the Labor Rights Advisory Board chair in January 2025, so the two-chair count describes the launch line-up rather than the position today.
The network convened on the Iran shock without a publicly identified U.S. seat
The May 26 session was the fifth regular meeting of the crisis-response network, held virtually and convened by its chair. The Korean trade ministry's statement named four participants, the chair together with Australia, Japan, and Singapore, and did not enumerate the remaining five or record the United States as present or absent. The public record does not establish whether the United States participated. The attendance statement names several participants, does not list the United States, and fits a prior non-participation pattern that included an earlier critical-minerals exercise, with Commerce, State, and USTR declining to answer questions about U.S. participation. The ministry named the affected commodities, citing crude oil, LNG, petrochemical feedstocks including naphtha, fertilizers including urea, and helium. The agenda covered selecting the next chair and improving the network's operating framework, which signals that the remaining members are planning succession and continuity rather than letting the body lapse as Washington appears to step back.
The body moves information, not cargo
The crisis-response network is, by the agreement's own design, an emergency communications channel for sharing information, requesting and offering assistance, and running stress tests and tabletop exercises. It is not binding. It has no dispute settlement, no enforcement, no pooled stockpile, and no authority to allocate supply. The network can surface what partners are seeing and what they intend to do, but it cannot reroute a tanker or release a reserve. The forum is a signal channel, not a relief mechanism.
The exposure runs through one chokepoint and lands on Asian buyers
The commodities the ministry named cluster because they are tied to the same Gulf oil-and-gas complex and move through the same chokepoint. The Energy Information Administration reported that about 20 million barrels per day moved through the Strait of Hormuz in 2024, roughly 20 percent of global petroleum-liquids consumption and more than a quarter of global seaborne oil trade, with about a fifth of global LNG trade transiting the strait, most of it Qatari. The same data show that 84 percent of the crude oil and condensate and 83 percent of the LNG passing through Hormuz in 2024 went to Asian markets, led by China, India, Japan, and South Korea. Helium follows the same geography, since Qatar accounts for roughly 30 percent of world capacity and produces most of it as a byproduct of LNG at Ras Laffan. Urea and ammonia exposure also sits in the same Gulf complex, though available estimates vary materially depending on whether the denominator is production, exports, or seaborne trade.
Japan draws roughly 90 to 95 percent of its crude from the Middle East and routes about 70 percent of its crude imports through Hormuz. The United States, by contrast, imported only about 0.5 million barrels per day through the strait in 2024, near 7 percent of its crude and condensate imports and about 2 percent of its petroleum-liquids consumption. Washington is physically insulated even though it stays exposed to global price effects. A disruption tied to U.S. military action therefore falls hardest on the United States' own Indo-Pacific partners, who are coordinating their response through a channel the United States built but is no longer visibly using.
The CPTPP precedent says the framework can outlast U.S. participation
This is the second time a U.S.-initiated Indo-Pacific economic framework has carried on without Washington. The United States left the Trans-Pacific Partnership by executive order in January 2017, and the eleven remaining members then concluded the CPTPP and brought it into force in December 2018. The supply-chain pillar is even easier to keep running, because it carries no market access for anyone to lose, so the cost of U.S. absence is informational and diplomatic rather than tariff-related. The members' work on succession and the operating framework is the clearest sign that they mean to keep it going.
The United States also sits outside the CPTPP, which China has applied to join, and outside RCEP, where China is a member. A hollowed-out U.S. role in IPEF weakens the de-risking counterweight the supply-chain pillar was meant to provide, though the network's active members remain U.S. security partners and the body is not one China could join. The framework's other pillars are in force without controversy, with the clean-economy and overarching agreements effective in October 2024 and the fair-economy agreement a day later, while the USTR-led trade pillar was never concluded.
What this changes for a practitioner
The immediate signal is about reliability. U.S. supply-chain diplomacy is, for now, not a dependable anchor for forward planning. The United States built this framework, held formal leadership in two of its three bodies at launch, and now appears practically absent without a formal exit, a reminder that cooperative executive arrangements that are neither treaties nor congressionally approved do not reliably survive a change of administration. The cleanest legal marker to watch is a formal withdrawal notice on or after February 24, 2027.
The framework itself looks durable. The supply-chain machinery should keep operating among the participating members, on the CPTPP precedent and on the network's own succession planning, so firms in those jurisdictions can plan around continued council and network activity even as U.S. participation lapses.
The harder problem for U.S.-headquartered firms is information. Early visibility into partner-government readouts, route-diversification plans, and stress-test findings is more likely to reach companies close to participating governments. Where exposure to the named commodities is material, the practical step is to track member-government statements directly and, in the most exposed cases, to build a presence or a partner relationship inside a participating member state.
On the commodities, helium and feedstocks carry the asymmetric risk. Oil and LNG shocks are visible and broadly hedgeable, while helium runs through a thin market with no meaningful U.S. strategic reserve after the Federal Helium Reserve sale and a short liquid shelf life, and naphtha has fewer ready substitutes. The benchmark that moves the posture is the strait, not the forum. A durable Hormuz normalization, with war-risk insurance premiums easing back toward pre-war levels, relieves the squeeze, while a renewed closure or mining would justify accelerating inventory and locking in alternative routing.
Bottom line
IPEF is not the shock absorber. It is the signal channel. During the Iran and Hormuz shock, that channel appears to be running through America's partners rather than Washington, and for any firm exposed to the named commodities the operative decision signal is route, inventory, supplier concentration, and insurance premium, not the IPEF forum itself.
Caveats
The live Hormuz picture is volatile and should be treated as provisional, with continued commercial traffic reported in mid-June even as flows ran below normal and stayed subject to renewed security risk. U.S. absence from the May 26 meeting rests on the public-record gap and the prior-exercise pattern rather than a primary government document, and Commerce, State, and USTR have declined to comment. Outlets frame the underlying conflict differently, which affects how the trigger is described but not the commodity exposure. The succession and operating-framework outcome was not settled as of the readout. The urea and ammonia concentration figures vary with the denominator used and should be read as a range.
Source note
This analysis draws on the U.S. Department of Commerce and the U.S. Department of State for the agreement's entry into force, parties, and depositary status, the text of the IPEF Supply Chain Agreement for the three governing bodies and the withdrawal article, and the inaugural-meeting records for the chair assignments. The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade records Australia's January 2025 takeover of the Labor Rights Advisory Board chair. The May 26, 2026 meeting details come from Korea's trade ministry and contemporaneous English-language Korean trade-press reporting. Commodity-flow figures come from the U.S. Energy Information Administration for Hormuz throughput and Asian destination shares, with helium capacity from industry and USGS data and the Federal Helium System sale recorded by the Bureau of Land Management. The CPTPP precedent and the status of the other IPEF pillars rest on the respective entry-into-force records. The prior non-participation pattern and the agency non-responses are drawn from trade-press reporting.