All Things China

[Typical Lax Dad]

We wanted those cheap goods and were willing to go in to debt as a nation.

Yep. It has been good for the consumer and 401Ks. Genie out of the bottle. TPP was a rational response. What has been the replacement strategy?

[Typical Lax Dad]

We wanted those cheap goods and were willing to go in to debt as a nation.

Did we ? Who speaks for "we" ? We buy what's readily available.

Walmart

[foreverlax]

We wanted those cheap goods and were willing to go in to debt as a nation.

Did we ? We sure did!! Who speaks for "we" ?I am not sure what you are saying...suspect you are implying our elected officals. We buy what's readily available. Also not sure what you mean. It is foolish to assume people 90% of Americans will pay 4-5x the cost, becaause it's made in America.

WMT is the poster child for decent quality at low prices....heck even Trump's stuff isn't made in America.

[foreverlax]

We wanted those cheap goods and were willing to go in to debt as a nation.

Yep. It has been good for the consumer and 401Ks. Genie out of the bottle. TPP was a rational response. What has been the replacement strategy?

Completely rational...so much so that it seems like the only course to keep China in check. Maybe Trump will have the idea to do a partnership with everyone in the FE, other then China. Duh.

[a fan]

Of course our trade deficit with China is getting worse. The only way to prevent that would be to freeze all trade with China.
Trump is trying to limit further damage going forward.

What makes you say that? Citation? Show me the document that says that's what he's going to do.

You're not listening. At no point----verbally, or written-----has Trump said "I'm going to keep hight tariffs on all imported Chinese goods when this new deal is signed".

Again, Trump could EASILY lower tariffs on Chinese goods in exchange for more corporate access (lower tariffs, lower trade barriers, etc.) to the Chinese marketplace. Trump would call that a major victory. And the American worker would be screwed, again.

Nobody can undo all that's been done over the past 3-4 decades.

Damage to whom? US Corporations and the 1%ers are doing great, and have been for the entire time.

You are ASSUMING that Trump's "perfect deal" would help the American worker. I have NO CLUE where you are getting that idea. You just made it up, based on nothing.

Trump's trying to limit the pendulum swing & protect domestic sectors, just like Japan, the EU & other 1st world economies do.

No. No he isn't. I AM the domestic sector. I'm getting hammered by what Trump is doing. And there is zero----zero----guarantee that a new Trade deal, assuming Trump can get one, will help me.

[MDlaxfan76]

Over the past 50 years, have you lived in Japan or the EU & tried to purchase US goods ?

If not, you haven't experienced the "tariff terrorism" they reference.

Boy it's been SO AWFUL being an American in my lifetime...boo bloody hoo, salty.

We could have a reasonable discussion about how best to address world trade dynamics, but this whining about how awful it is to be an American is just batsh-t crazy.

Show me other countries which have been impacted like the US by the Walmarts & other big box mega stores, selling low quality Chinese junk.
Show me the abandoned town center or strip mall storefronts in Japan or Germany.
Their governments protected their manufacturers & small retailers. Ours did not.

Show me the country you'd have preferred to have been from these past 70 years.
Japan? Germany? really?

It's not too late...

[MDlaxfan76]

We wanted those cheap goods and were willing to go in to debt as a nation.

Did we ? Who speaks for "we" ? We buy what's readily available.

Really, that's how capitalism works???

It gets very confusing when right wing, nativist, isolationist, protectionists want government to control everything and then get all nasty when someone uses the word 'socialism'. Very confusing.

[old salt]

We've been losing the Trade War without putting up a fight.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/ ... opolitics/

The president’s China tariffs may inflict short-term pain on American consumers, but it’s a small price to pay to combat an existential threat to the U.S.

Economists and business leaders used to nervously reassure themselves that China tariffs were a temporary negotiating tactic to get President Xi to make concessions in a future trade agreement, but the truth is emerging that trade war is the new normal. The Trump administration has ceased talk of soybean-purchase agreements and begun talk of “decoupling.”

Trump’s decision to change our posture toward China from free trade to trade war is one of the most significant policy shifts in recent American history — and one of the most misunderstood.

Free-trade advocates tend to think of tariffs as misbegotten economic policy, intended to give the American economy a leg up by protecting domestic businesses from Chinese competition. They point to data indicating that tariffs are injuring the American economy more than they are helping it, ...tariffs are a tax on American businesses, consumers, and investment. But we should be happy to pay taxes toward a worthwhile end. Indeed, if the end is important enough, and a tax helps us achieve it, paying could be a patriotic duty. The Chinese call this “eating bitterness.”

Few ends are more important than economic growth, but the free traders err in assuming that a China trade policy that fails to immediately deliver more of it is bad, because one more-important end is geopolitical survival. The true value of the trade war lies in preventing American businesses from aiding the rise of an adversary.

The Chinese Communist Party is pursuing a long-term goal of global hegemony. The foundation of its authoritarian system is high-tech surveillance, which it uses to monitor its citizens’ every move. To build this panopticon more efficiently, China is seeking to lead the world in AI, telecom, and other advanced technologies, and so requires foreign companies that enter the Chinese market to “share” some intellectual property while running aggressive industrial-espionage operations to take the rest.

Because China doesn’t have the natural resources to dominate high-tech industries, it is also pursuing a neo-colonial foreign policy to acquire them. That requires power projection, so China has turned a dozen countries around the world into client states through debt peonage, collateralizing abusive loans with concessions for military bases and deep-water ports. Larger countries such as Pakistan and Burma have been brought into the Chinese orbit through dependence on infrastructure financing from the Belt and Road Initiative and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, China’s answer to the U.S.-led World Bank.

China’s growth strategy represents a direct threat to the United States. Historically, the emergence of a peer competitor to an existing hegemon has always resulted in bloodshed. Beijing’s economic expansion is already fueling a policy of military expansion in Asia, which threatens to bring China into conflict with American allies Japan, South Korea, India, and the Philippines. Optimists who believe that economic interdependence will forever forestall conflict must be made to explain why, following its integration into the world economy, China became more authoritarian and more militaristic rather than less. We should expect the trend to continue, not reverse. The Pentagon certainly does: Its 2018 National Defense Strategy is built around a shift from small wars to “great-power competition” with China.

...there’s no market rule barring a surveillance state from winning the competition. In that competition, our ideological commitment to free trade is nearly as great a handicap as the Soviet Union’s commitment to central planning was during the Cold War. Free trade with China means allowing its distortions into our market. Refusing to allow our government to “pick winners” by rejecting industrial-policy support to key sectors means that Beijing will pick winners for us. Depending on comparative advantage to organize supply chains means, in effect, that we will watch helplessly as American innovations are transformed into growth-boosting industries elsewhere, as firms reap efficiency gains by locating their engineering and management operations next to their manufacturing. Inevitably, the innovation will depart too. A recent survey of 369 manufacturers found that American firms are moving their R&D operations to China not just to take advantage of lower costs, but to be in close proximity to their supply chains. Some 50 percent of foreign R&D centers in China are now run by American companies, helping China achieve first place in market share for manufacturing R&D. If we remain neutral as to where supply chains are located, “we innovate, they build” will become “they innovate, they build.”

China’s rise may be inevitable. But given the danger represented by that rise, America can choose to minimize its risk. It can reduce opportunities for China to erode the long-term competitive advantage of American firms through forced technology transfer and R&D migration, and reduce our dependence on Chinese manufacturing for crucial industrial and military supply chains. In a word: decoupling.

Trump’s trade war is a recognition that American policy toward China should seek to prevent American businesses from speeding the rise of an adversary. Tariffs are one piece of an emerging anti-China strategy. The Trump administration is rolling out new export controls to limit the transfer of sensitive technologies such as AI and quantum computing. And it has blacklisted high-tech Chinese firms such as the telecom giant Huawei from doing business in the U.S.

Tariffs are failing if the goal is the lowest prices for consumers — the free traders’ preferred metric of success. But if strategic decoupling is the goal, tariffs are succeeding. The New York Times recently reported that “American companies that once believed the trade war would blow over are now scrambling to limit their exposure to China.” Dozens of American companies — including high-tech giants Apple, HP, Dell, and Google’s parent company, Alphabet — have outlined plans to move their supply chains out of China in the coming years. Future business is leaving too: 30 percent of CEOs surveyed by the U.S.–China Business Council have delayed or cancelled investments in China due to trade pressure. Trump’s call for American businesses to leave China is being heeded — not because of his tweets, but because of his tariffs.

This weakens China in important ways. First, while American consumer pain is temporary, the decision to move business operations out of China is permanent. Second, tariffs frustrate China’s ability to move up the value chain to export higher-tech goods rather than low-margin commodities, because Chinese exporters are more likely to absorb the cost of tariffs on high-margin goods rather than passing it to consumers. Lastly, tariffs have forced China to retaliate by devaluing the yuan, which makes servicing the dollar-dominated bonds that underpin its domestic economy more difficult and frustrates its long-term goal of making the yuan a leading global currency. Given all of this and the fact that China remains poorer and less politically stable than the U.S., Chinese observers have suggested that it is more vulnerable than the U.S. to the impact of a trade war.

...the latest round of tariffs applies to low-margin goods such as clothing — the kinds of goods least likely to return to the U.S. and least important to China’s strategic advance up the value chain. Tariffs should target the sectors that China itself identified as crucial to its rise in its Made in China 2025 strategy — robotics, telecom, energy, aerospace, and other value-added sectors. For lower-value goods such as apparel, the harm done by tariffs to American businesses facing cost increases really does outweigh the harm done to China. If Trump continues to tax these sectors, he should extend the relief already being supplied to farmers who lost Chinese orders to other businesses such as Xero Shoes, a successful American small business now scrambling to find an alternative to Chinese factories.

Perhaps Trump’s most serious misstep has been the failure of his administration to explain the trade war in geopolitical terms, instead preferring to talk about closing trade deficits and thereby ceding the terms of the fight to the free traders. Vice President Pence outlined a comprehensive anti-China strategy just last year, but that narrative has failed to embed itself in the public consciousness, and now popular understanding of the trade war is unhelpfully colored by Trump’s improvised economic musings on Twitter.

Americans have been taught to see free trade as core to our identity, and the Republican policy firmament remains filled with thinkers who can’t acknowledge that a neutral policy of “let the market decide” means, in this case, “let the Chinese Communist Party decide.” As Marco Rubio put it in a recent report on China’s rise: “In a world of state competition for valuable industries, a domestic policy of neutrality is itself a selection of priority.” If we refuse to allow even short-term harm to come to consumers while China resolves to “eat bitterness,” we will lose the long-term geopolitical competition for productivity, innovation, and power. And if we continue to believe that the world is better off with a liberal democracy at the helm rather than an authoritarian surveillance state, that cannot be allowed to happen.

When geopolitical advantage rather than low consumer prices is the desired end, tariffs help get us there. Out of patriotism, we must now be willing to eat some bitterness of our own.

Rubio gets it. This is nothing compared to the economic sacrifices we made to prevail in WW-II.
Let's do it without firing a shot, this time. Act from a position of strength.

[Trinity]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/05/us/t ... ilies.html

Fort Campbell middle school kids are pitching in....

Does Magalito understand that we get products for our money?

[Typical Lax Dad]

We've been losing the Trade War without putting up a fight.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/ ... opolitics/

The president’s China tariffs may inflict short-term pain on American consumers, but it’s a small price to pay to combat an existential threat to the U.S.

Economists and business leaders used to nervously reassure themselves that China tariffs were a temporary negotiating tactic to get President Xi to make concessions in a future trade agreement, but the truth is emerging that trade war is the new normal. The Trump administration has ceased talk of soybean-purchase agreements and begun talk of “decoupling.”

Trump’s decision to change our posture toward China from free trade to trade war is one of the most significant policy shifts in recent American history — and one of the most misunderstood.

Free-trade advocates tend to think of tariffs as misbegotten economic policy, intended to give the American economy a leg up by protecting domestic businesses from Chinese competition. They point to data indicating that tariffs are injuring the American economy more than they are helping it, ...tariffs are a tax on American businesses, consumers, and investment. But we should be happy to pay taxes toward a worthwhile end. Indeed, if the end is important enough, and a tax helps us achieve it, paying could be a patriotic duty. The Chinese call this “eating bitterness.”

Few ends are more important than economic growth, but the free traders err in assuming that a China trade policy that fails to immediately deliver more of it is bad, because one more-important end is geopolitical survival. The true value of the trade war lies in preventing American businesses from aiding the rise of an adversary.

The Chinese Communist Party is pursuing a long-term goal of global hegemony. The foundation of its authoritarian system is high-tech surveillance, which it uses to monitor its citizens’ every move. To build this panopticon more efficiently, China is seeking to lead the world in AI, telecom, and other advanced technologies, and so requires foreign companies that enter the Chinese market to “share” some intellectual property while running aggressive industrial-espionage operations to take the rest.

Because China doesn’t have the natural resources to dominate high-tech industries, it is also pursuing a neo-colonial foreign policy to acquire them. That requires power projection, so China has turned a dozen countries around the world into client states through debt peonage, collateralizing abusive loans with concessions for military bases and deep-water ports. Larger countries such as Pakistan and Burma have been brought into the Chinese orbit through dependence on infrastructure financing from the Belt and Road Initiative and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, China’s answer to the U.S.-led World Bank.

China’s growth strategy represents a direct threat to the United States. Historically, the emergence of a peer competitor to an existing hegemon has always resulted in bloodshed. Beijing’s economic expansion is already fueling a policy of military expansion in Asia, which threatens to bring China into conflict with American allies Japan, South Korea, India, and the Philippines. Optimists who believe that economic interdependence will forever forestall conflict must be made to explain why, following its integration into the world economy, China became more authoritarian and more militaristic rather than less. We should expect the trend to continue, not reverse. The Pentagon certainly does: Its 2018 National Defense Strategy is built around a shift from small wars to “great-power competition” with China.

...there’s no market rule barring a surveillance state from winning the competition. In that competition, our ideological commitment to free trade is nearly as great a handicap as the Soviet Union’s commitment to central planning was during the Cold War. Free trade with China means allowing its distortions into our market. Refusing to allow our government to “pick winners” by rejecting industrial-policy support to key sectors means that Beijing will pick winners for us. Depending on comparative advantage to organize supply chains means, in effect, that we will watch helplessly as American innovations are transformed into growth-boosting industries elsewhere, as firms reap efficiency gains by locating their engineering and management operations next to their manufacturing. Inevitably, the innovation will depart too. A recent survey of 369 manufacturers found that American firms are moving their R&D operations to China not just to take advantage of lower costs, but to be in close proximity to their supply chains. Some 50 percent of foreign R&D centers in China are now run by American companies, helping China achieve first place in market share for manufacturing R&D. If we remain neutral as to where supply chains are located, “we innovate, they build” will become “they innovate, they build.”

China’s rise may be inevitable. But given the danger represented by that rise, America can choose to minimize its risk. It can reduce opportunities for China to erode the long-term competitive advantage of American firms through forced technology transfer and R&D migration, and reduce our dependence on Chinese manufacturing for crucial industrial and military supply chains. In a word: decoupling.

Trump’s trade war is a recognition that American policy toward China should seek to prevent American businesses from speeding the rise of an adversary. Tariffs are one piece of an emerging anti-China strategy. The Trump administration is rolling out new export controls to limit the transfer of sensitive technologies such as AI and quantum computing. And it has blacklisted high-tech Chinese firms such as the telecom giant Huawei from doing business in the U.S.

Tariffs are failing if the goal is the lowest prices for consumers — the free traders’ preferred metric of success. But if strategic decoupling is the goal, tariffs are succeeding. The New York Times recently reported that “American companies that once believed the trade war would blow over are now scrambling to limit their exposure to China.” Dozens of American companies — including high-tech giants Apple, HP, Dell, and Google’s parent company, Alphabet — have outlined plans to move their supply chains out of China in the coming years. Future business is leaving too: 30 percent of CEOs surveyed by the U.S.–China Business Council have delayed or cancelled investments in China due to trade pressure. Trump’s call for American businesses to leave China is being heeded — not because of his tweets, but because of his tariffs.

This weakens China in important ways. First, while American consumer pain is temporary, the decision to move business operations out of China is permanent. Second, tariffs frustrate China’s ability to move up the value chain to export higher-tech goods rather than low-margin commodities, because Chinese exporters are more likely to absorb the cost of tariffs on high-margin goods rather than passing it to consumers. Lastly, tariffs have forced China to retaliate by devaluing the yuan, which makes servicing the dollar-dominated bonds that underpin its domestic economy more difficult and frustrates its long-term goal of making the yuan a leading global currency. Given all of this and the fact that China remains poorer and less politically stable than the U.S., Chinese observers have suggested that it is more vulnerable than the U.S. to the impact of a trade war.

...the latest round of tariffs applies to low-margin goods such as clothing — the kinds of goods least likely to return to the U.S. and least important to China’s strategic advance up the value chain. Tariffs should target the sectors that China itself identified as crucial to its rise in its Made in China 2025 strategy — robotics, telecom, energy, aerospace, and other value-added sectors. For lower-value goods such as apparel, the harm done by tariffs to American businesses facing cost increases really does outweigh the harm done to China. If Trump continues to tax these sectors, he should extend the relief already being supplied to farmers who lost Chinese orders to other businesses such as Xero Shoes, a successful American small business now scrambling to find an alternative to Chinese factories.

Perhaps Trump’s most serious misstep has been the failure of his administration to explain the trade war in geopolitical terms, instead preferring to talk about closing trade deficits and thereby ceding the terms of the fight to the free traders. Vice President Pence outlined a comprehensive anti-China strategy just last year, but that narrative has failed to embed itself in the public consciousness, and now popular understanding of the trade war is unhelpfully colored by Trump’s improvised economic musings on Twitter.

Americans have been taught to see free trade as core to our identity, and the Republican policy firmament remains filled with thinkers who can’t acknowledge that a neutral policy of “let the market decide” means, in this case, “let the Chinese Communist Party decide.” As Marco Rubio put it in a recent report on China’s rise: “In a world of state competition for valuable industries, a domestic policy of neutrality is itself a selection of priority.” If we refuse to allow even short-term harm to come to consumers while China resolves to “eat bitterness,” we will lose the long-term geopolitical competition for productivity, innovation, and power. And if we continue to believe that the world is better off with a liberal democracy at the helm rather than an authoritarian surveillance state, that cannot be allowed to happen.

When geopolitical advantage rather than low consumer prices is the desired end, tariffs help get us there. Out of patriotism, we must now be willing to eat some bitterness of our own.

Rubio gets it. This is nothing compared to the economic sacrifices we made to prevail in WW-II.
Let's do it without firing a shot, this time. Act from a position of strength.

I’ll take China in a battle of long marches by the people of China vs USA.

[Trinity]

Rubio gets Trump? Please. Rubio sends me Biblical phrases and Trump’s in the middle stages of dementia, executing the Peter Navarro Strategy, a guy Kushner found with Google.
Yes, let’s gamble away our markets on this team.

“Today, Trump chose his ineffective wall over the needs of 120+ U.S. military bases and cut our efforts to counter Russia by undermining the European Deterrence Initiative, which is sure to please Putin but harms transatlantic security and our European allies.”
West Point grad Sen Jack Reed of RI.

[MDlaxfan76]

We've been losing the Trade War without putting up a fight.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/ ... opolitics/

The president’s China tariffs may inflict short-term pain on American consumers, but it’s a small price to pay to combat an existential threat to the U.S.

Economists and business leaders used to nervously reassure themselves that China tariffs were a temporary negotiating tactic to get President Xi to make concessions in a future trade agreement, but the truth is emerging that trade war is the new normal. The Trump administration has ceased talk of soybean-purchase agreements and begun talk of “decoupling.”

Trump’s decision to change our posture toward China from free trade to trade war is one of the most significant policy shifts in recent American history — and one of the most misunderstood.

Free-trade advocates tend to think of tariffs as misbegotten economic policy, intended to give the American economy a leg up by protecting domestic businesses from Chinese competition. They point to data indicating that tariffs are injuring the American economy more than they are helping it, ...tariffs are a tax on American businesses, consumers, and investment. But we should be happy to pay taxes toward a worthwhile end. Indeed, if the end is important enough, and a tax helps us achieve it, paying could be a patriotic duty. The Chinese call this “eating bitterness.”

Few ends are more important than economic growth, but the free traders err in assuming that a China trade policy that fails to immediately deliver more of it is bad, because one more-important end is geopolitical survival. The true value of the trade war lies in preventing American businesses from aiding the rise of an adversary.

The Chinese Communist Party is pursuing a long-term goal of global hegemony. The foundation of its authoritarian system is high-tech surveillance, which it uses to monitor its citizens’ every move. To build this panopticon more efficiently, China is seeking to lead the world in AI, telecom, and other advanced technologies, and so requires foreign companies that enter the Chinese market to “share” some intellectual property while running aggressive industrial-espionage operations to take the rest.

Because China doesn’t have the natural resources to dominate high-tech industries, it is also pursuing a neo-colonial foreign policy to acquire them. That requires power projection, so China has turned a dozen countries around the world into client states through debt peonage, collateralizing abusive loans with concessions for military bases and deep-water ports. Larger countries such as Pakistan and Burma have been brought into the Chinese orbit through dependence on infrastructure financing from the Belt and Road Initiative and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, China’s answer to the U.S.-led World Bank.

China’s growth strategy represents a direct threat to the United States. Historically, the emergence of a peer competitor to an existing hegemon has always resulted in bloodshed. Beijing’s economic expansion is already fueling a policy of military expansion in Asia, which threatens to bring China into conflict with American allies Japan, South Korea, India, and the Philippines. Optimists who believe that economic interdependence will forever forestall conflict must be made to explain why, following its integration into the world economy, China became more authoritarian and more militaristic rather than less. We should expect the trend to continue, not reverse. The Pentagon certainly does: Its 2018 National Defense Strategy is built around a shift from small wars to “great-power competition” with China.

...there’s no market rule barring a surveillance state from winning the competition. In that competition, our ideological commitment to free trade is nearly as great a handicap as the Soviet Union’s commitment to central planning was during the Cold War. Free trade with China means allowing its distortions into our market. Refusing to allow our government to “pick winners” by rejecting industrial-policy support to key sectors means that Beijing will pick winners for us. Depending on comparative advantage to organize supply chains means, in effect, that we will watch helplessly as American innovations are transformed into growth-boosting industries elsewhere, as firms reap efficiency gains by locating their engineering and management operations next to their manufacturing. Inevitably, the innovation will depart too. A recent survey of 369 manufacturers found that American firms are moving their R&D operations to China not just to take advantage of lower costs, but to be in close proximity to their supply chains. Some 50 percent of foreign R&D centers in China are now run by American companies, helping China achieve first place in market share for manufacturing R&D. If we remain neutral as to where supply chains are located, “we innovate, they build” will become “they innovate, they build.”

China’s rise may be inevitable. But given the danger represented by that rise, America can choose to minimize its risk. It can reduce opportunities for China to erode the long-term competitive advantage of American firms through forced technology transfer and R&D migration, and reduce our dependence on Chinese manufacturing for crucial industrial and military supply chains. In a word: decoupling.

Trump’s trade war is a recognition that American policy toward China should seek to prevent American businesses from speeding the rise of an adversary. Tariffs are one piece of an emerging anti-China strategy. The Trump administration is rolling out new export controls to limit the transfer of sensitive technologies such as AI and quantum computing. And it has blacklisted high-tech Chinese firms such as the telecom giant Huawei from doing business in the U.S.

Tariffs are failing if the goal is the lowest prices for consumers — the free traders’ preferred metric of success. But if strategic decoupling is the goal, tariffs are succeeding. The New York Times recently reported that “American companies that once believed the trade war would blow over are now scrambling to limit their exposure to China.” Dozens of American companies — including high-tech giants Apple, HP, Dell, and Google’s parent company, Alphabet — have outlined plans to move their supply chains out of China in the coming years. Future business is leaving too: 30 percent of CEOs surveyed by the U.S.–China Business Council have delayed or cancelled investments in China due to trade pressure. Trump’s call for American businesses to leave China is being heeded — not because of his tweets, but because of his tariffs.

This weakens China in important ways. First, while American consumer pain is temporary, the decision to move business operations out of China is permanent. Second, tariffs frustrate China’s ability to move up the value chain to export higher-tech goods rather than low-margin commodities, because Chinese exporters are more likely to absorb the cost of tariffs on high-margin goods rather than passing it to consumers. Lastly, tariffs have forced China to retaliate by devaluing the yuan, which makes servicing the dollar-dominated bonds that underpin its domestic economy more difficult and frustrates its long-term goal of making the yuan a leading global currency. Given all of this and the fact that China remains poorer and less politically stable than the U.S., Chinese observers have suggested that it is more vulnerable than the U.S. to the impact of a trade war.

...the latest round of tariffs applies to low-margin goods such as clothing — the kinds of goods least likely to return to the U.S. and least important to China’s strategic advance up the value chain. Tariffs should target the sectors that China itself identified as crucial to its rise in its Made in China 2025 strategy — robotics, telecom, energy, aerospace, and other value-added sectors. For lower-value goods such as apparel, the harm done by tariffs to American businesses facing cost increases really does outweigh the harm done to China. If Trump continues to tax these sectors, he should extend the relief already being supplied to farmers who lost Chinese orders to other businesses such as Xero Shoes, a successful American small business now scrambling to find an alternative to Chinese factories.

Perhaps Trump’s most serious misstep has been the failure of his administration to explain the trade war in geopolitical terms, instead preferring to talk about closing trade deficits and thereby ceding the terms of the fight to the free traders. Vice President Pence outlined a comprehensive anti-China strategy just last year, but that narrative has failed to embed itself in the public consciousness, and now popular understanding of the trade war is unhelpfully colored by Trump’s improvised economic musings on Twitter.

Americans have been taught to see free trade as core to our identity, and the Republican policy firmament remains filled with thinkers who can’t acknowledge that a neutral policy of “let the market decide” means, in this case, “let the Chinese Communist Party decide.” As Marco Rubio put it in a recent report on China’s rise: “In a world of state competition for valuable industries, a domestic policy of neutrality is itself a selection of priority.” If we refuse to allow even short-term harm to come to consumers while China resolves to “eat bitterness,” we will lose the long-term geopolitical competition for productivity, innovation, and power. And if we continue to believe that the world is better off with a liberal democracy at the helm rather than an authoritarian surveillance state, that cannot be allowed to happen.

When geopolitical advantage rather than low consumer prices is the desired end, tariffs help get us there. Out of patriotism, we must now be willing to eat some bitterness of our own.

Rubio gets it. This is nothing compared to the economic sacrifices we made to prevail in WW-II.
Let's do it without firing a shot, this time. Act from a position of strength.

I’ll take China in a battle of long marches by the people of China vs USA.

Unfortunately that's right.
The Chinese have enormous growth potential that is going to happen with or without us. Moreover, their people and system are fully prepared to "eat bitterness" while ours is designed for rapid accountability. Faced with fascism in Europe and militarism in Japan, including horrific atrocities, the American people were opposed to war. And that's in the face of adversaries using military force to take land and resources, subjugating others by force. Killing hundreds of thousands, with millions in the queue. Roosevelt used Lend-Lease and a blockade of Japan to ease us into the conflict, but it wasn't until Pearl Harbor that the American public was actually willing to "eat bitterness" to prevail in the coming conflict.

So, what these Trump apologists, including Rubio (!), are saying is that we should see China as an "existential threat" and in response we should declare 'war' ...and expect it to be a peaceful, bloodless process. Just some higher consumer prices.

Hoo boy.
What happens when the Chinese finally get fed up with us and stop or even just significantly slow buying US Treasuries...let me help: interest rates skyrocket at the same time we have dramatic economic slowdown. It ain't just some higher consumer prices. It'll mean massive layoffs, plummeting real estate values, etc, etc.

There's a huge difference between seeing China in terms of "great power competition" (as does the Pentagon) and declaring them an "existential threat" and declaring 'war' to be necessary to prevent them from increasing their standard of living to be comparable to our own.

There is simply no way to "win" such a conflict.

Which isn't to say that the challenge of China isn't hugely critical and that we should be passive. That's why Obama declared that strategic pivot. And that's why TPP made sense. Not perfect, but far, far better than simply having China the only player in that region exercising strategic consistency. We do need to "compete" but "war" is incredibly foolish and immensely dangerous.

It isn't too late to unwind the damage done by Trump, but strap in for a world wide depression that will make the most recent trauma look like nothing at all if we continue the current course.

[Typical Lax Dad]

Rubio gets Trump? Please. Rubio sends me Biblical phrases and Trump’s in the middle stages of dementia, executing the Peter Navarro Strategy, a guy Kushner found with Google.
Yes, let’s gamble away our markets on this team.

“Today, Trump chose his ineffective wall over the needs of 120+ U.S. military bases and cut our efforts to counter Russia by undermining the European Deterrence Initiative, which is sure to please Putin but harms transatlantic security and our European allies.”
West Point grad Sen Jack Reed of RI.

He must have kids in daycare.

[Farfromgeneva]

Good one

[old salt]

Rubio gets Trump? Please. Rubio sends me Biblical phrases and Trump’s in the middle stages of dementia, executing the Peter Navarro Strategy, a guy Kushner found with Google.
Yes, let’s gamble away our markets on this team.

“Today, Trump chose his ineffective wall over the needs of 120+ U.S. military bases and cut our efforts to counter Russia by undermining the European Deterrence Initiative, which is sure to please Putin but harms transatlantic security and our European allies.”
West Point grad Sen Jack Reed of RI.

120+ US bases are at least 40 more than needed. Another BRAC is long overdue. Unfortunately, BRAC has become just another pork barrel that pays out more in economic impact than saved by the closings. ...too big to reduce.

If those European projects are vital to EU security, our NATO hosts can pick up the tab for their bases, it's not that much to get the capability we bring. It could be credited to reduce their 2% gdp shortfall.

Reed's just upset that West Point's cemetery expansion is delayed a year.
They'ii still have room for him.

[Trinity]

All kidding aside, you don’t think a wall is any more effective than I do, even if Mexico paid.
Hey, did You see McGurk today on the dishonesty of our recent Afghanistan moves? Fewer troops. More stated objectives. Draw the results with a sharpie, I guess. He’s not buying it.

[a fan]

We've been losing the Trade War without putting up a fight.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/ ... opolitics/

The president’s China tariffs may inflict short-term pain on American consumers, but it’s a small price to pay to combat an existential threat to the U.S.

Economists and business leaders used to nervously reassure themselves that China tariffs were a temporary negotiating tactic to get President Xi to make concessions in a future trade agreement, but the truth is emerging that trade war is the new normal. The Trump administration has ceased talk of soybean-purchase agreements and begun talk of “decoupling.”

Trump’s decision to change our posture toward China from free trade to trade war is one of the most significant policy shifts in recent American history — and one of the most misunderstood.

Free-trade advocates tend to think of tariffs as misbegotten economic policy, intended to give the American economy a leg up by protecting domestic businesses from Chinese competition. They point to data indicating that tariffs are injuring the American economy more than they are helping it, ...tariffs are a tax on American businesses, consumers, and investment. But we should be happy to pay taxes toward a worthwhile end. Indeed, if the end is important enough, and a tax helps us achieve it, paying could be a patriotic duty. The Chinese call this “eating bitterness.”

Few ends are more important than economic growth, but the free traders err in assuming that a China trade policy that fails to immediately deliver more of it is bad, because one more-important end is geopolitical survival. The true value of the trade war lies in preventing American businesses from aiding the rise of an adversary.

The Chinese Communist Party is pursuing a long-term goal of global hegemony. The foundation of its authoritarian system is high-tech surveillance, which it uses to monitor its citizens’ every move. To build this panopticon more efficiently, China is seeking to lead the world in AI, telecom, and other advanced technologies, and so requires foreign companies that enter the Chinese market to “share” some intellectual property while running aggressive industrial-espionage operations to take the rest.

Because China doesn’t have the natural resources to dominate high-tech industries, it is also pursuing a neo-colonial foreign policy to acquire them. That requires power projection, so China has turned a dozen countries around the world into client states through debt peonage, collateralizing abusive loans with concessions for military bases and deep-water ports. Larger countries such as Pakistan and Burma have been brought into the Chinese orbit through dependence on infrastructure financing from the Belt and Road Initiative and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, China’s answer to the U.S.-led World Bank.

China’s growth strategy represents a direct threat to the United States. Historically, the emergence of a peer competitor to an existing hegemon has always resulted in bloodshed. Beijing’s economic expansion is already fueling a policy of military expansion in Asia, which threatens to bring China into conflict with American allies Japan, South Korea, India, and the Philippines. Optimists who believe that economic interdependence will forever forestall conflict must be made to explain why, following its integration into the world economy, China became more authoritarian and more militaristic rather than less. We should expect the trend to continue, not reverse. The Pentagon certainly does: Its 2018 National Defense Strategy is built around a shift from small wars to “great-power competition” with China.

...there’s no market rule barring a surveillance state from winning the competition. In that competition, our ideological commitment to free trade is nearly as great a handicap as the Soviet Union’s commitment to central planning was during the Cold War. Free trade with China means allowing its distortions into our market. Refusing to allow our government to “pick winners” by rejecting industrial-policy support to key sectors means that Beijing will pick winners for us. Depending on comparative advantage to organize supply chains means, in effect, that we will watch helplessly as American innovations are transformed into growth-boosting industries elsewhere, as firms reap efficiency gains by locating their engineering and management operations next to their manufacturing. Inevitably, the innovation will depart too. A recent survey of 369 manufacturers found that American firms are moving their R&D operations to China not just to take advantage of lower costs, but to be in close proximity to their supply chains. Some 50 percent of foreign R&D centers in China are now run by American companies, helping China achieve first place in market share for manufacturing R&D. If we remain neutral as to where supply chains are located, “we innovate, they build” will become “they innovate, they build.”

China’s rise may be inevitable. But given the danger represented by that rise, America can choose to minimize its risk. It can reduce opportunities for China to erode the long-term competitive advantage of American firms through forced technology transfer and R&D migration, and reduce our dependence on Chinese manufacturing for crucial industrial and military supply chains. In a word: decoupling.

Trump’s trade war is a recognition that American policy toward China should seek to prevent American businesses from speeding the rise of an adversary. Tariffs are one piece of an emerging anti-China strategy. The Trump administration is rolling out new export controls to limit the transfer of sensitive technologies such as AI and quantum computing. And it has blacklisted high-tech Chinese firms such as the telecom giant Huawei from doing business in the U.S.

Tariffs are failing if the goal is the lowest prices for consumers — the free traders’ preferred metric of success. But if strategic decoupling is the goal, tariffs are succeeding. The New York Times recently reported that “American companies that once believed the trade war would blow over are now scrambling to limit their exposure to China.” Dozens of American companies — including high-tech giants Apple, HP, Dell, and Google’s parent company, Alphabet — have outlined plans to move their supply chains out of China in the coming years. Future business is leaving too: 30 percent of CEOs surveyed by the U.S.–China Business Council have delayed or cancelled investments in China due to trade pressure. Trump’s call for American businesses to leave China is being heeded — not because of his tweets, but because of his tariffs.

This weakens China in important ways. First, while American consumer pain is temporary, the decision to move business operations out of China is permanent. Second, tariffs frustrate China’s ability to move up the value chain to export higher-tech goods rather than low-margin commodities, because Chinese exporters are more likely to absorb the cost of tariffs on high-margin goods rather than passing it to consumers. Lastly, tariffs have forced China to retaliate by devaluing the yuan, which makes servicing the dollar-dominated bonds that underpin its domestic economy more difficult and frustrates its long-term goal of making the yuan a leading global currency. Given all of this and the fact that China remains poorer and less politically stable than the U.S., Chinese observers have suggested that it is more vulnerable than the U.S. to the impact of a trade war.

...the latest round of tariffs applies to low-margin goods such as clothing — the kinds of goods least likely to return to the U.S. and least important to China’s strategic advance up the value chain. Tariffs should target the sectors that China itself identified as crucial to its rise in its Made in China 2025 strategy — robotics, telecom, energy, aerospace, and other value-added sectors. For lower-value goods such as apparel, the harm done by tariffs to American businesses facing cost increases really does outweigh the harm done to China. If Trump continues to tax these sectors, he should extend the relief already being supplied to farmers who lost Chinese orders to other businesses such as Xero Shoes, a successful American small business now scrambling to find an alternative to Chinese factories.

Perhaps Trump’s most serious misstep has been the failure of his administration to explain the trade war in geopolitical terms, instead preferring to talk about closing trade deficits and thereby ceding the terms of the fight to the free traders. Vice President Pence outlined a comprehensive anti-China strategy just last year, but that narrative has failed to embed itself in the public consciousness, and now popular understanding of the trade war is unhelpfully colored by Trump’s improvised economic musings on Twitter.

Americans have been taught to see free trade as core to our identity, and the Republican policy firmament remains filled with thinkers who can’t acknowledge that a neutral policy of “let the market decide” means, in this case, “let the Chinese Communist Party decide.” As Marco Rubio put it in a recent report on China’s rise: “In a world of state competition for valuable industries, a domestic policy of neutrality is itself a selection of priority.” If we refuse to allow even short-term harm to come to consumers while China resolves to “eat bitterness,” we will lose the long-term geopolitical competition for productivity, innovation, and power. And if we continue to believe that the world is better off with a liberal democracy at the helm rather than an authoritarian surveillance state, that cannot be allowed to happen.

When geopolitical advantage rather than low consumer prices is the desired end, tariffs help get us there. Out of patriotism, we must now be willing to eat some bitterness of our own.

Rubio gets it. This is nothing compared to the economic sacrifices we made to prevail in WW-II.
Let's do it without firing a shot, this time. Act from a position of strength.

This National Review piece is just the rantings of some kid.

He----and old salt, for that matter-------keep projecting their own magic personal aspirations on to Trump's Trade War. Trump isn't doing what you are claiming he is doing. He's also not executing the Trade War for the REASONS you and this child-writer with no CV from the National Review is inventing from whole cloth.

You are putting lipstick on a pig. Trump would sign a trade deal that gave American corporations more access to China tomorrow. A Machiavellian, overarching, geopolitical strategy simply doesn't exist for Trump.

Trump just wants to claim a "better" deal with China. And you can look at the new NAFTA to see what a "win" is in Trump's mind....and the new NAFTA was a nothingburger that made minor changes to trade.

[old salt]

OK tough guy. Do you see China as a threat. If yes, what did you & Obama do to counter that threat ?

[old salt]

All kidding aside, you don’t think a wall is any more effective than I do, even if Mexico paid.
Hey, did You see McGurk today on the dishonesty of our recent Afghanistan moves? Fewer troops. More stated objectives. Draw the results with a sharpie, I guess. He’s not buying it.

McGurk also said it might work, depending on how big the drawdown is & who we leave behind.
He pointed out that it's not a total withdrawal.

We have to test the Taliban & force the Afghan govt to stand on their own.
So long as they know we're there to prop them up, they'll continue to suck us dry.
We won't be there to walk Afghan girls to school. That's no longer our responsibility.
We're leaving an intel network & Special Operations force.
Airstrikes & a quick reaction force, on call, in theatre, just over the horizon.
We're not leaving completely & can backfill if necessary.

[old salt]

Which isn't to say that the challenge of China isn't hugely critical and that we should be passive. That's why Obama declared that strategic pivot. And that's why TPP made sense. Not perfect, but far, far better than simply having China the only player in that region exercising strategic consistency. We do need to "compete" but "war" is incredibly foolish and immensely dangerous.

It isn't too late to unwind the damage done by Trump, but strap in for a world wide depression that will make the most recent trauma look like nothing at all if we continue the current course.

Obama's strategic pivot was little more than a slogan. Mattis made it reality under Trump.
We don't need TPP to force our supply networks out of China. HRC & Biden both dropped it like a hot potato.
Your GOP globalists, along with Clinton, kicked the can down the road. Trump's the first President to try to reverse the trend.
China's strategic consistency is hegemony, mandatory tech transfer & theft of IP.