Trumps animosity shows no letting up free#
Republicans who vociferously used to support free trade have been mostly silent about Trump’s trade war, save to hope that there will soon be a deal that forces China to make changes. foreign and economic policy toward China, he represents a broad political consensus that Beijing is a bad actor that has gotten away with too much, has values and interests inimical to our own, and represents a threat to American prosperity-all of which suggest that a much harder stance is merited. While Trump is driving the specifics of U.S. To many Americans, it seemed absurd that the league would defend a repressive communist regime rather than an American citizen’s exercise of free speech, and the NBA has been portrayed widely as craven and venal, holding economics above morals. A remarkable cross-current of people, many of them not even political or partisan, denounced the NBA for giving a lukewarm defense of free speech, seemingly because it fears economic retaliation from China. As early as 2004, the Democratic nominee for president, John Kerry, was saying that companies that sourced jobs to China were being led by “Benedict Arnold CEOs.” Or take the more recent imbroglio over the NBA, sparked by a tweet from the Houston Rockets’ general manager expressing support for the Hong Kong protests against Beijing. Such attitudes are widespread in American society, including among many of the president’s detractors, and have been germinating for years. While trade between the two countries has not contracted nearly as much as one might have expected given these moves, most analysts believe that both American and Chinese economic growth has suffered considerably.īut there should be no illusion Trump or his trade advisers invented the idea that China is a U.S. Meanwhile, the United States has restricted the ability of Chinese companies such as Huawei to do business with American companies, and the Chinese government has begun putting pressure on American companies doing business in China. agricultural goods, leading to Washington’s $25 billion bailout of American farmers. Beijing has retaliated by slashing purchases of U.S.
The current administration has done its best to disrupt that relationship, from the first set of tariffs imposed in the spring of 2018 to the latest tranche in August, which slapped 25 percent duties on several hundred billion dollars’ worth of imports from China. There’s no question that the U.S.-China economic relationship, which had been carefully developed over the past 20 years, is at a new low in the Trump era. Unless Americans begin to revise their impression of China, recognizing its limitations and its vast potential and treating it as a partner rather than a foe, China is unlikely to alter course in fact, it is entirely possible that more and more draconian measures could plunge the United States and China into a deep economic tailspin.
This matters because the hardening of attitudes toward China across a wide swath of American society seems to be resulting in bad policy: confrontational and punitive strategies that are just hard-core enough to undermine relations, but not nearly sufficient to pressure China into making systemic changes or to help the United States find viable alternatives to the needs China currently fulfills. When it comes to the multiple and many self-inflicted wounds that the current U.S.-China trade war has caused and the many more it will likely cause in the future, Trump may have lit the match, but Americans of all stripes added the kindling for years beforehand.
That animosity runs deep in American society and cuts across partisan lines and geography, with politicians across the spectrum regularly asserting Beijing’s status as an adversary and some 60 percent of the American public now holding unfavorable views of China. But the truth is that American animosity to the rise of China can’t all be attributed to President Donald Trump. consumers for decades, clearly initiated the current trade war. The Trump administration, with its fixation on trade balances and its view that the Chinese have ripped off U.S. Notwithstanding the mini deal the White House announced late last week, the state of U.S.-China relations remains tense, and there is no reason to expect that they will ease up.
Zachary Karabell is a contributing editor at Politico Magazine.
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