President Donald Trump faces a tricky adversary when it comes to Beijing, but the policies he has adopted have strong historical evidence to support them.
According to a report published Tuesday by The Wall Street Journal, Trump’s broader tariff strategy might now have morphed into a China-focused economic weapon.
Or has the president had China in mind from the beginning?
Last week, Trump announced a 90-day pause on tariffs for countries that had indicated an interest in negotiating trade deals with the U.S. But he excluded China from the pause and even saddled that nation with a higher punitive tariff.
Of course, the establishment media framed the pause as a Trump backing down. But the China exception hinted at a deeper strategy.
Now, the Journal has reported that the Trump administration will use tariff negotiations to further cripple its Asian rival.
“The idea is to extract commitments from U.S. trading partners to isolate China’s economy in exchange for reductions in trade and tariff barriers imposed by the White House,” the Journal article stated.
“U.S. officials plan to use negotiations with more than 70 nations to ask them to disallow China to ship goods through their countries, prevent Chinese firms from locating in their territories to avoid U.S. tariffs, and not absorb China’s cheap industrial goods into their economies.”
Furthermore, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has taken the lead.
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In fact, according to the Journal, Bessent broached the idea to Trump on April 6 at the president’s estate at the Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida. Trump announced the 90-day pause three days later.
Bessent’s suggestion, therefore, preceded the pause. One wonders, therefore, if it also contributed to it.
Either way, whether Bessent planted a new idea, or whether Trump has had this China-focused strategy in mind all along, one must concede that the Journal quoted exclusively anonymous sources, noting that the “White House and Treasury didn’t respond to requests for comment.”
On one hand, of course, that should not surprise us. After all, it hardly makes sense to publicly reveal one’s negotiating strategy in advance. Let the Chinese read such stories from anonymous sources, and, whether true or not, let those stories prod Chinese officials to the bargaining table if possible.
That does, however, introduce the aforementioned “tricky” element.
In short, economists may take one view based on data-driven models and such, but historians take a different view.
To begin, modern history represents the outlier, for China long remained isolated from most of the world. Moreover, since 1949, the current communist regime has shown no qualms about impoverishing and terrorizing its own people.
Furthermore, the Chinese have long memories. They know, for instance, that in the 19th century the British Empire effectively forced open their markets by getting millions of Chinese addicted to opium (historically speaking, Americans do not hold an exclusive, fentanyl-related moral high ground).
A series of disastrous wars and unequal treaties followed, as other Western predators took their own spoils, deepening China’s humiliation.
With that background, the Chinese government, cognizant of history, will not necessarily bend to the pressures Westerners expect.
That does not mean that Trump has adopted the wrong policy. But it does mean that the president would do well to temper expectations regarding China. The U.S. unquestionably will thrive without an influx of Chinese goods produced by cheap labor. The Chinese government, however, will not necessarily bargain in order to avoid that outcome.
Meanwhile, Trump continues to show that he understands both history and America’s interests better than his political opponents.
“The ball is in China’s court. China needs to make a deal with us. We don’t have to make a deal with them. China wants what we have … the American consumer,” Trump said last week in a statement, read by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt during a press briefing, according to the Journal.
That demonstrates precisely the correct view of things.
After all, American statesmen since James Madison have argued precisely the same thing. Free trade remains the ideal, but if nations refuse to adopt reciprocal trade policies, if they abuse or otherwise take advantage of Americans, then Americans have no obligation to give those nations unfettered access to the vast American market. To do so, in fact, would qualify as suicide.
In sum, a China-focused strategy might not yield entirely the results that some in Trump’s administration expect, but even if it’s only partially successful, it could change the game of U.S.-China trade relations.
And either way, the president’s broader tariff policy represents one of wisest and most promising measures any U.S. statesman has ever pursued.
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