And all will be right with the "trade war"?
How long before we admit that it is all but impossible to circumvent free market economics by decree without harming yourself as much (if not more) than anyone else?
In other words, when will we just admit that a broad scale trade war has never actually been "won"? And only a fool with a history of bankruptcy and falsehood would even try to suggest otherwise.
It's time to wake up and smell the coffee --- the 19th century wasn't all that great and foreign countries don't pay tariffs --- US importers and consumers do. Tariffs are ultimately a tax on you.
During both the Bush and Obama administrations, the United States policy, as expressed in both the Bush Doctrine and the Obama Doctrine, involved promoting democracy and freedom abroad and fighting against rogue regimes. The main difference between the two doctrines was that Bush was fine with acting unilaterally and Obama wanted to act multilaterally.
Anyway both doctrines also had that the United States would continue strategic partnerships with certain authoritarian regimes to promote American interests. Like the American partnership with Saudi Arabia.
During both administrations, the US worked closely with Russia and China too! Bush and Obama viewed North Korea and Iran and Libya as rogue regimes. China and Russia worked with USA on Obama Iran Nuclear Deal of 2015. China and Russia also helped USA in terms of North Korea during the Bush admin in terms of sanctions. Russia and China chose not to interfere in NATO operations in Libya during Obama’s time.
But over the past many years the US relationship with China seems to have worsened catastrophically. It cant be because of authoritarianism. The USA has no problem having strategic partnerships with authoritarian countries in the past and even had such a partnership with China post Nixon all the way through to Obama and his nuclear deal with Iran which China and Russia assisted in.
So what has happened? Nowadays you see the US Media saying that China Russia are rogue regimes in an axis with North Korea and Iran. Why did the US push these countries towards Iran and North Korea? Just 10 years ago both countries were working with America against those other two.
And now the decoupling between China and America is accelerating.
I guess this is something historians will be writing many books about for centuries to come.
China took a step back, looked at global trade and economics and designed a hybrid economic system to take advantage of it.
China's hybrid system is internally socialist but externally capitalist. A system where the overall focus is on the common good of the country to the detriment of the rest of the world.
Such as system eliminates a lot of inefficiency found in most capitalistic systems --- things like knowledge hording and in-fighting (aka "trade secrets", "copyright", "patents" and associated legal wrangling). As long as corruption is held in reasonable check, such a system offers a natural advantage.
The capitalist system in the USA is focused on individual companies. They made the mistake of believing their own rhetoric --- they never considered something like what China has done to even be possible. They just assumed China leadership would be driven by the same forces and play the trade game in the same way they do.
After several decades, the USA is just now starting to accept the fact that they have been proven wrong. And the response is the dumbest imaginable act of desperation --- a global trade war that attacks both allies and enemies.
selkin•9mo ago