I) 3 European Powers Say They Will Join China-Led Bank II) Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank: France, Germany and Italy said to join and III) France & Germany to join China-led $50bn infrastructure bank, along with Italy.

BRUSSELS — Ignoring direct pleas from the Obama administration, Europe’s biggest economies have declared their desire to become founding members of a new Chinese-led Asian investment bank that the United States views as rival to the World Bank and other institutions set up at the height of American power afterWorld War II.

The announcement on Tuesday by Germany, France and Italy that they would follow Britain and join the Chinese-led venture delivered a stinging rebuke to Washington from some of its closest allies. It also called into question whether the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which grew out of a multination conference in Bretton Woods, N.H., in 1944 and established an economic pecking order that lasted 70 years, will find their influence diminished.

The announcement by Germany, Europe’s largest economy, came only six days after Secretary of State John Kerry asked his German counterpart, Frank Walter-Steinmeier, to resist the Chinese overtures until the Chinese agreed to a number of conditions about transparency and governing of the new entity. But Germany came to the same conclusion that Britain did: China is such a large export and investment market for them that they could not afford to stay on the sidelines.

American officials have fumed that China never approached the Group of 7 — the consortium of economic powers that the United States has led — but rather decided to pick off individual members, setting a deadline of the end of March for them to make a decision whether to join the new organization, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which many refer to by its initials, the A.I.I.B. China, in turn, has long chafed at the idea that the World Bank’s president is traditionally an American, and that France appoints the head of the I.M.F.

“This has been a power struggle,” one senior European official said. “And we have moved from the world of 1945.”

In Washington, Jennifer Psaki, the State Department spokeswoman, declined to criticize the countries that announced they would seek to participate, but expressed reservations. “It is up to each country to make their own decision about whether they will join,” Ms. Psaki said, “but it will be important for prospective members of the A.I.I.B. to push for the adoption of those same high standards that other international institutions abide by, including strong board oversight and safeguards.”

The European decision is bound to help efforts by Xi Jinping, China’s president and Communist Party chief, to reshape the global balance of power, starting with the institutions that underpin it.

Mr. Xi’s predecessors chose to join some of those institutions, including the World Trade Organization, and work from within to amend some of their rules more to China’s liking. But, with the new bank, China appears to be ramping up previously halting efforts to also build new, Sino-centric institutions from scratch. China’s control of the bank, however, will face constraints. Britain has insisted on a senior post on its board, and Germany will do the same.

China has worked steadily for years to break what it regards as an unfair grip by the United States on global political and financial institutions and to set up rival structures more responsive to Chinese demands for a voice in international affairs commensurate with its status as the world’s second-biggest economy.

“China is shaping an alternative universe and getting America’s European allies to support it,” said Theresa Fallon, a China expert at the European Institute for Asian Studies, a Brussels research group.

The United States lobbied its allies not to join the new China-based bank. The United States has argued that he bank at best duplicates, at worst undermines, the role of the Washington-based World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, which has its headquarters in the Philippines, a close American ally at odds with Beijing over the South China Sea. The I.M.F., which manages financial crises, is less directly affected.

Ms. Fallon said she expected that South Korea, another close American ally, would also sign up for the new Chinese bank and that “in the end only Japan won’t say yes.” China, she said, is offering a “whole economic and political package that provides an alternative to the creaking international structures shaped by the U.S. in the postwar period.”

Western officials and anticorruption groups have long criticized China’s lending practices, particularly for infrastructure projects in Africa involving Chinese companies, saying they foster corruption and undercut efforts by the World Bank and I.M.F. to link loans to demands for good governing. China rejects such complaints, pointing to its success in building roads and railway lines quickly in countries bereft of Western capital.

In an apparent reference to such concerns, France, Germany and Italy, in a statement declaring their eagerness to join the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, said they were “keen to work with the A.I.I.B. founding members to establish an institution that follows the best standards and practices in terms of governance, safeguards, debt and procurement policies.”

Snubbing the bank would have angered Beijing, but aside from earning Chinese good will it was not immediately clear what European countries will gain by joining other than the right to endorse and help finance infrastructure projects that, in many case, are likely to be dominated by Chinese, not European, construction companies.

Europe’s defiance of pressure from Washington over the Chinese-led bank does not signal a major rupture, according to analysts. But, they say, it does add friction at a time when the marquee project of trans-Atlantic solidarity, a proposed free trade deal, has lost much of its momentum in face of fierce hostility from European politicians and activists opposed to American-style capitalism.

While heavily dependent on the United States for security, especially since the crisis in Ukraine erupted last year, European countries, Ms. Fallon said, “tend to take the U.S. for granted” while “China is very good at lobbying them and promising them things.” But she said Washington had been unwise to expend diplomatic and political capital over the Chinese-led bank when it was clear that even staunch allies like Britain wanted to join it.