Trump Faces Down the China Threat He knows their weaknesses and isn’t afraid to apply pressure.National Review, Aug 8, 2019, Conrad Black
Of much greater importance to the political and strategic course of the United States than the shabby attempt to portray President Trump as a racist is the developing showdown between the United States and China. [...]
[...]
What Trump is doing, adapted to different times, regimes, and circumstances, is what Mr. Churchill urged when he opposed the appeasers in the 1930s. China is not a threat as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were, has not overcommitted to an arms race with an entirely command economy, and is not as overtly threatening as Hitler, Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev were. But China is explicitly aiming to become the world’s greatest power and is, accordingly, a very serious challenge. [...]
China’s conduct in Myanmar (Burma), where they were so heavy-handed that they were eventually pushed out, and in parts of Africa where they are large investors, and their attempt to reduce the South China Sea to Chinese territorial waters all demonstrate China’s will to dominate and exact exaggerated deference, unlike anything in America’s international behavior. This is the time to have a nonviolent showdown, which will require reform, at least insofar as they apply to the U.S., of Chinese practices in “forced technology transfer and cyber theft, intellectual property rights, services, currency, agriculture and non-tariff barriers to trade.â€
China purported to agree on all this in April but declined to consider any enforcement mechanism. This is a familiar Chinese method of negotiating, which has been imitated by the North Koreans. If there is a reason for optimism in the present raucously antagonistic American political atmosphere, it is that the Democrats have generally supported the president in these positions, indicating that the old adage that “partisanship ends at the water’s edge†retains some applicability.
Yet the stock response of the president’s reflexive media critics is an absurd solicitude for their country’s principal rival, a chronic cheat in world trade matters by universal agreement. China is a poor country with few resources while the United States, with a year to retool and reorient itself, would not have to import any necessities except perhaps small quantities of rare earths. China still has 300 million people who live pretty much as they did 2,000 years ago, a 40 percent command economy, no institutions that command any respect except the People’s Army; and not a word or figure it publishes about its economy can be unreservedly believed.
It is trying an end run around the entire world economic system at the same time that it asserts itself with conjoined military and economic expansionism in susceptible areas. Of course this president will save China’s “face†if that’s what it comes to, but in contrast to all the havering ninnies in
The Economist and like-minded places, the strongest cheering section President Trump enjoys in the execution of his China policies consists of China’s neighbors: Vietnam, India, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia. They are a ready group of important states to resurrect a refined containment policy slightly modeled on the North Atlantic alliance but with more emphasis on economic issues.
More:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/trump-faces-down-china-threat/
