Trump vs China is about to rock Asia’s world

Trump vs China is about to rock Asia’s world

Trump cabinet appointments signal China trade war is reality not rhetoric, meaning all of Asia will get caught in the crossfire

William Pesek reports for Asia Times…

When US President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping meet on Saturday (November 16), they might find common ground on one grave threat to the global economy in 2025: Donald Trump.

In the days since his election win on November 5, the former and future US president has been busily naming anti-China hardliners and known loyalists for top cabinet posts.

They include Florida Senator Marco Rubio to lead US diplomacy. Rubio would be the first sitting secretary of state sanctioned by Beijing, meaning he can’t even visit the country.

Rubio’s presence alone would represent “a nightmare come true” for Xi’s Communist Party, notes Zhu Junwei, a director at Grandview Institution in Beijing and a former researcher for the People’s Liberation Army.

Add in policy hawk Robert Lighthizer, Trump’s former and likely future trade czar. Earlier this year, he talked of a Trump 2.0 desire to devalue the US dollar, Argentina-style, to boost exports.

And then there’s Mike Waltz, one of the most vocal China critics in Congress who’s called Xi’s government an “existential threat,” as Trump’s national security adviser.

Trump tapped New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, a fierce China critic, to be his United Nations ambassador. Nor can Xi’s inner circle be happy about Trump naming Beijing critic John Ratcliffe to head the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or FOX News host Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense.

In a recent YouTube appearance, Hegseth accused China of “building an army specifically dedicated to defeating the United States of America” and using its increasing market share in tech and manufacturing to amass global influence.

“They have a full-spectrum long-term view of not just regional but global domination,” Hegseth said. “The only way they can implement a structure that can serve them is by defeating us. They are ambitious enough to put in a plan to do it.”

Such views explain why Xi’s party is bracing for the Trumpian storm to come. And why Biden and Xi have much to discuss this weekend, when the two men meet on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Peru.

The tete-a-tete will serve as a bookend for Biden’s own attempts since 2021 to take on an increasingly assertive China.

But the 60% tariff Trump plans to slap on all Made in China goods is a place Biden was never willing to go. And wisely so, given that Trump’s ripped-from-the-1980s trade strategy will boomerang back on American households early and often through higher inflation.

Back in the mid-80s, an era when Trump’s economic worldview calcified, trade wars, currency depreciation, trickle-down economics and paranoia about Japanese CEOs stealing America’s future dominated the zeitgeist.

The trouble with Trump’s tariff-heavy response to today’s economic boogeyman – China – is that it’s an attempt to revive and respond to a system that no longer exists.

This 1985 problem was obvious during the Trump 1.0 era from 2017 to 2021. Along with taxes on Chinese goods, Trump’s signature “reform” was a massive US$1.7 trillion tax cut that was more the stuff of the go-go Ronald Reagan years than a strategy to reanimate American competitiveness for the future.

It did little to incentivize chieftains to compete with China the organic way — by getting the US economy in better shape domestically…

Continue this analysis at Asia Times

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