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Tag Archives: trade war

Making News: Back on National Radio Talking China Tariff Cuts and Inflation

27 Wednesday Apr 2022

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Making News

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Biden administration, CBS Eye on the World with John Batchelor, China, consumer goods, Donald Trump, Gordon G. Chang, inflation, John Batchelor, Making News, near-shoring, reshoring, supply chains, tariffs, trade war

I’m pleased to announce that tonight I’m scheduled to be back on the nationally syndicated “CBS Eye on the World with John Batchelor.” Air time for the segment is yet to be determined, but the show is on nightly between 9 PM and 1 AM EST. You can listen live on-line here (among many other stations) as John, co-host Gordon G. Chang, and I discuss my recent report about the Biden administration mulling cutting the Trump tariffs on lots of imports from China – for completely bogus reasons.

As usual, a podcast of the interview will be posted as soon as one’s available.

And keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments.

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Following Up: Podcasts of National and New York City Radio Interviews Now On-Line

26 Tuesday Apr 2022

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Following Up

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American politics, Bernie Sanders, Biden, Biden administration, China, decoupling, Democrats, Donald Trump, election 2022, election 2024, Following Up, Frank Morano, inflation, Market Wrap with Moe Ansari, midterms 2022, Moe Ansari, prices, recession, Republicans, Ron DeSantis, tariffs, The Other Side of Midnight, trade policy, trade war, Ukraine, Ukraine-Russia war

I’m pleased to announce that the podcasts are now on-line of my two radio interviews yesterday (and one technically this morning) on a wide range of foreign policy, economic, and U.S. political topics.

Click here to listen to my appearance on Moe Ansari’s nationally syndicated “Market Wrap” show, where we did a deep dive into the questions of whether or not President Biden’s thinking seriously of cutting some of the Trump tariffs on imports from China, and the likelihood and wisdom of America pulling off any kind of significant divorce from the Chinese economy. The segment starts at about the 21:40 mark.

At this link, you can access my conversation with host Frank Morano on his late-night WABC-AM (New York City) show “The Other Side of Midnight.” It covered the impact of tariffs on consumer prices, the outlook for America’s inflation-ridden economy, the chances that the Ukraine war goes nuclear, and the odds of (figurative) earthquakes down the road for American presidential politics – for starters!

In addition, click here for the second half of my interview on the U.S. government-run Voice of America – which zeroes in on Ukraine war-related global economic disruptions. (Yes, the segment was pre-my latest haircut!)

And keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments.

Making News: On Late Night NYC Radio Tonight Talking Biden’s Possible China Tariff Cave-in

25 Monday Apr 2022

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Making News

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Biden, Biden family, China, Frank Morano, Hunter Biden, Making News, tariffs, The Other Side of Midnight, Trade, trade war, WABC AM

When it rains, it (sort of) pours. I’m pleased to announce broadcast interview number two today – a scheduled return to Frank Morano’s “The Other Side of Night” radio show on New York City’s WABC-AM. The segment is scheduled to start at 1:30 AM EST (that is, technically Tuesday morning), and we’ll be zeroing in on the amazing (at least to me) hints coming from the Biden administration that tariffs on lots of imports from China will soon be cut. But no doubt we’ll be talking some New York City sports, too.

You can listen live at this link.  But for all of you early birds and others, as usual, I’ll post a link to the podcast as soon as one’s available.

And keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Biden Big Wigs Signal a Cave-in on China Tariffs

25 Monday Apr 2022

Posted by Alan Tonelson in (What's Left of) Our Economy

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apparel, bicycles, Biden, Biden administration, CAFTA, Central America, Central America Free Trade Agreement, China, consumer goods, consumer price index, CPI, Daleep Singh, Donald Trump, Hunter Biden, Immigration, inflation, Janet Yellen, Mexico, NAFTA, North American Free Trade Agreement, tariffs, Trade, trade war, {What's Left of) Our Economy

In theory, once can always be dismissed as a gaffe (even President Biden isn’t the speaker) or a trial balloon motivated by genuine uncertainty and curiosity. Twice, especially within two days, looks an awful lot like the preview of a policy change. Which is why recent remarks by two senior Biden administration officials last week are so worrisome. If that’s the game they’re playing, then the President is planning what could be major cuts in the Trump tariffs on China – without requiring any meaningful concessions from China in return. Even worse, the rationale being advanced – reducing inflation — is completely bogus.

This potential tariff-cutting spadework began last Thursday, when deputy White House national security advisor Daleep Singh told a conclave of globalist poohbahs that tariffs could advance U.S. [in the words of Reuters reporter Andrea Shalal “strategic priorities such as strengthening critical supply chains and maintaining U.S. preeminence in foundational technologies and to support national security.”

But, he added (in his words) “For product categories that are not implicated by those objectives, there’s not much of a case for those tariffs being in place. Why do we have tariffs on bicycles or apparel or underwear?”

“So that’s the opportunity,” he continued. “It could be that in this moment of elevated inflation and China having its own very serious supply chain concerns … maybe there’s something we can do there.” Singh also suggested that eliminating such U.S. tariffs could prompt China to cut duties on comparable American products, though he didn’t establish such Chinese moves as a condition.

The very next day, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on Bloomberg Television that “We’re re-examining carefully our trade strategy with respect to China” and that removing the tariffs is “worth considering. We certainly want to do what we can to address inflation, and there would be some desirable effects. It’s something we’re looking at.”

One immediate problem with Yellen’s position is that she herself has belittled it. As recently as last December, she testified to Congress that cuts in so-called non-strategic tariffs would not be an inflation “game-changer.”

In addition, although Yellen might be excused for not recognizing a major strategic benefit that the China tariffs could create, to the second in command in President Biden’s National Security Council – which is supposed to look at the nation’s global opportunities and challenges holistically – they should be obvious. Specifically, these kinds of labor-intensive consumer goods are exactly the kinds of products that could create the kinds of vital economic opportunities in Mexico and Central America that could many of the incentives for mass emigration.

Indeed, as I’ve written, pre-Trump presidents’ short-sighted decision to pursue trade liberalization with virtually all low-income countries guaranteed that the gains that could have flowed to U.S. neighbors via the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) would shift instead to China and the other more competitive economies of East Asia. Just something to keep in mind the next time the Biden administration claims it’s serious about solving the “root causes” of mass migration in this hemisphere.

As for the inflation angle, Singh and Yellen have some big questions to answer. First of all, all sports vehicles (the category in which the U.S. Labor Department includes bicycles when it breaks down the contributions made to rising prices by different types of goods and services) comprise about 0.4 percent of the core Consumer Price Index (CPI) and apparel makes up about 3.2 percent. So it is indeed difficult to understand how stemming price rises of these products could be an inflation game-changer, as Yellen observed. (See here for the official CPI breakdown.)

Second, and at least as important, announced tariffs on some Chinese bicycles and bike products had already been suspended for much of the Trump China trade war period. For the rest of imports from China in this grouping, the 25 percent tariff remained unchaged. Yet annual inflation in the sports vehicles category has ranged from 4.8 percent in February, 2021 (President Biden’s first full month in office) to 10.52 percent this past January. Why such dramatic price fluctuation and big net increase over time? 

As for U.S. apparel imports, products from China represented just about a quarter of the U.S. global total last year – so it would seem that these goods represented just about a quarter of the total apparel contribution to the CPI (or about 0.80 percent).  And the Trump trade war levies cover just a tiny share of these imports, according to this industry source. Even so, however, annual apparel inflation rates have fluctuated even more dramatically than those for the bicycle category during the Biden presidency. They’ve ranged from -3.72 percent in February, 2021 to 6.79 percent last month (the latest available figures). 

The only possible explanation for these trends: As with the rest of the economy, apparel and bicycle prices have been determined ovewhelmingly by forces other than tariffs – principally the status of the CCP Virus pandemic and of the overall economic growth and consumption rates it’s so powerfully influenced; the injection of trillions of dollars worth of stimulus injected into the economy by the administration, the Congress, and the Federal Reserve; the supply chain snags that have caused shortages and therefore boosted prices of practically everything that needs to be transported; and the energy price rises that have generated the same kinds of effects. In other words, it’s the supply and demand, stupid.

And speaking of stupid, that adjective doesn’t begin to describe the politics of this seemingly impending Biden move. In an election year, does the President really want to expose himself to charges of being soft on China? Especially since evidence keeps emerging of his son Hunter’s lucrative business dealings with Chinese interests – which have clearly feathered the nests of the entire Biden family, including the President’s?

Even though, as I’ve pointed out, Mr. Biden has been a China coddler for his entire career in Washington, I was convinced that the American public’s mounting fear and loathing of the Beijing dictatorship would keep persuading him to follow the basic Trump approach to China trade. Indeed, his chief trade advisor implicitly endorsed this Trump strategy less than a month ago and indicated it would shape Biden administration polic going forward.

The President can still stop this initiative in its tracks.  But if he doesn’t, he’ll have only himself to blame when his political opponents ramp up their charges that he’s in Beijing’s pocket after all, and that his early China hawkishness meant that the payoff from his election, far from being off the table, was merely being delayed.  

Following Up: Podcast Now On-Line of NYC Radio Interview on Ukraine & Inflation…& More!

19 Tuesday Apr 2022

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Following Up

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Biden administration, Buck Showalter, China, decoupling, Donald Trump, Following Up, Frank Morano, globalization, inflation, Major League Baseball, New York Mets, tariffs, The Other Side of Midnight, Trade, trade war, Ukraine, Ukraine-Russia war, VOA, Voice of America, WABC AM

I’m pleased to announce that the podcast is now on-line of my interview late last night on Frank Morano’s “The Other Side of Night” radio show on New York City’s WABC-AM. Click here for a lively conversation on the Ukraine war, inflation, global economic decoupling, tariffs…and Buck Showalter???

In addition, a video is finally available of a Voice of America (VOA) interview I did last Monday, April 11, on the state of U.S.-China economic relations. Happily, the Chinese language service of this U.S. government foreign broadcasting agency is now offering telecasts that feature the English-language audio of non-Chinese speakers (like me) with the Chinese content in subtitles. So it’s much easier for non-Chinese speakers to understand that non-Chinese content than under the previous system, which featured simultaneous Chinese translation over the interviewees’ barely audible voice.        

And keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments

Glad I Didn’t Say That! Most Productive 8 Hours in Trade Policy History?

23 Wednesday Mar 2022

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Glad I Didn't Say That!

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aluminum, Biden administration, Commerce Department, Donald Trump, Gina Raimondo, Glad I Didn't Say That!, metals, steel, tariffs, Trade, trade war, United Kingdom

“U.S. Commerce chief says has nothing to report on [United

Kingdom] steel talks” 

– Reuters, 22 hours ago

 

“New U.S.-U.K. trade deal cuts tariffs on British steel, American

motorcycles, bourbon”

– Reuters, 14 hours ago

 

(Sources: “U.S. Commerce chief says has nothing to report on steel talks.” by David Shephardson, Reuters, March 22, 2022, https://www.reuters.com/business/us-commerce-chief-says-has-nothing-report-steel-talks-2022-03-22/ and “New U.S.-U.K. trade deal cuts tariffs on British steel, American motorcycles, bourbon,” by Andrea Shalal and David Lawder, Reuters, March 22, 2022, https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-us-trade-chiefs-meet-tuesday-steel-tariffs-source-2022-03-22/)

 

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Russia Sanctions May Be Sending a Crucial Message About U.S. China Policy

21 Monday Mar 2022

Posted by Alan Tonelson in (What's Left of) Our Economy

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Adam Posen, Antony J. Blinken, Biden, Biden administration, Bloomberg.com, Chad Bown, China, dollar, Donald Trump, finance, Foreign Affairs, foreign policy establishment, Mainstream Media, multilateralism, Qin Gang, reserve currency, Russia, sanctions, tariffs, Trade, trade war, Ukraine, Ukraine-Russia war, unilateralism, Wang Yi, {What's Left of) Our Economy

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has produced a genuinely strange – and potentially crucial – turn in the way American leaders and the political class of pundits and think tankers and the rest of the countrys influential chattering class are viewing and even conducting China policy. Because China could in theory significantly help Vladimir Putin’s never-impressive economy evade the full impact of global sanctions, they’re not only talking of only punishing the People’s Republic if it follows this course. They’re exuding confidence that Beijing could be cowed into backing down.

In other words, the conventional wisdom throughout the U.S. foreign policy,  economic policy, and media establishments now holds that Washington can bend China to its will because the Chinese ultimately need the United States much more economically than vice versa. Because this position looks like such a total reversal of what these folks insisted during the trade war supposedly started by Donald Trump with China, it raises these questions: If America’s leverage is great enough to change Chinese behavior that would mainly threaten another country’s security, isn’t it also great enough to change Chinese behavior that for decades has increasingly damaged America’s own economy, and also to pursue decoupling from the Chinese economy more energetically?

The Biden administration certainly is acting like it holds all the cards over China on anti-Russia sanctions. As a “senior administration official” told reporters in an – official – White House briefing last Friday, the President in his virtual meeting with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping that morning “made clear the implication and consequences of China providing material support — if China were to provide material support — to Russia as it prosecutes its brutal war in Ukraine, not just for China’s relationship with the United States but for the wider world.”

The day before, previewing the Biden-Xi call, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said  “President Biden will be speaking to President Xi tomorrow and will make clear that China will bear responsibility for any actions it takes to support Russia’s aggression, and we will not hesitate to impose costs.”

And the national policy establishments are giving these statements their Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. According to Chad Bown of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, who emerged as the Mainstream Media’s go-to critic of the Trump trade wars, “On the pure economic question, if China were to have to make the choice – Russia versus everyone else – I mean, it’s a no-brainer for China because it’s so integrated with all of these Western economies,”

His views, moreover, came in a Reuters article whose main thrust was “China’s economic interests remain heavily skewed to Western democracies….”

A Bloomberg.com analysis posted a week ago similarly asserted that China “needs good relations with the U.S. and its partners to meet its economic goals, particularly as growth slows to the slowest pace in in more than three decades.”

And although that point was keyed to the current state of China’s economic health – as opposed to the situation during the Trump years, the article also noted that Beijing has “resisted taking retaliatory measures that would hurt its own economy even when the U.S. has directly targeted Beijing. During the height of the trade war, China threatened but never implemented an ‘unreliable entities’ list, and even state-run banks have complied with U.S. sanctions on Hong Kong. It also delayed imposing an anti-sanctions law on the financial hub after businesses expressed concern.”

In all, it’s a stark contrast with the days during that Trump period when the Mainstream Media – relying heavily on analysts like Bown, who work for think tanks heavily funded by Offshoring Lobby interests – routinely ran stories headlined “Why the US would never win a trade war with China.”

Now sharp-eyed readers will notice one big difference between then and now: The Trump China and other tariffs were unilateral. It’s assumed – quite reasonably – that any Biden China sanctions would be undertaken jointly, along with many and possibly most other major national economies.

At the same time, no less than Peterson Institute President Adam Posen has just written in (no less than) Foreign Affairs that it’s the strength of the West’s financial services industries that “are what has truly advantaged the West over Russia in implementing effective sanctions, and what has deterred Chinese businesses from bailing Russia out.”

But these advantages are overwhelmingly the product of the dollar’s reserve currency status and the dominance of U.S. finance in that dominant Western finance sector. So even he’s indirectly admitted that U.S. power specifically has been the key. As a result, wielding the finance cudgel could have pushed the Europeans and Japanese to join in with the Trump China tariffs.

Some other consequential conclusions could flow from this new confidence about China. Maybe even without putting other big economies in the finance cross-hairs, Trump should have threatened – and if need be, imposed – the same kinds of financial sanctions on China instead of tariffs to try to force Beijing to end its predatory trade practices, and/or to press China to accept more U.S. imports. Or maybe a combination of the two would have been best. Maybe President Biden should add the finance sanctions to his decision to maintain most of the Trump tariffs. And if the United States enjoys this kind of leverage over China, wouldn’t the same hold for other troublesome trade partners, even big economies?

But perhaps the most convincing signs of the U.S.’ paramount leverage are coming from China itself. Last Tuesday, Foreign Minister Wang Yi asserted that Beijing would “safeguard its legitimate rights and interests” if hit by punitive U.S. and broader measures. But this language was pretty vague – and he also expressed China’s hope that it would avoid these sanctions to begin with. Moreover, yesterday, Beijing’s ambassador to Washington Qin Gang made clear that Beijing had rejected the option of sending Russia military aid – though he added that China would maintain its “normal trade, economic, financial, energy cooperation with Russia.”

Moreover, there’s no need to go all-in on the tariff, or other China specific sanctions (e.g., on tech entities) fronts yet.  Especially since China is facing mounting economic troubles at home (notably in its gigantic and thoroughly bubble-ized real estate sector) a string of increasingly aggressive “poke the dragon” measures could yield lots of useful information about how Beijing perceives its vulnerabilities without risking noteworthy countermeasures – and about the real extent of America’s capacity to deal with the China challenge.      

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Ukraine Crisis Grows Curiouser and Curiouser

21 Monday Feb 2022

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Our So-Called Foreign Policy

≈ 1 Comment

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Annaleena Baerbock, Biden adminisration, China, democracy, deterrence, Eastern Europe, energy, European Union, Germany, human rights, Italy, Mario Draghi, NATO, natural gas, Nordstream 2, North Atlantic treaty Organization, Olaf Scholz, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Phase One, Poland, Russia, sanctions, sovereignty, Taiwan, tariffs, The Wall Street Journal, Trade, trade war, Ukraine

The longer the Ukraine crisis lasts, the weirder it gets. Here are just the latest examples, keeping in mind that new developments keep appearing so quickly that this post might be overtaken by events before I finish!

>What’s with the Chinese? Toward the end of last year, (see, e.g., here) I’ve been worried that President Biden’s Ukraine policy would push Russia and China to work more closely to undermine U.S. interests around the world – a possibility that’s both especially worrisome given evident limits on American power (Google, e.g., “Afghanistan”), and completely unnecessary, since no remotely vital U.S. interests are at stake in Ukraine or anywhere in Eastern Europe.

In the last week, moreover, numerous other analysts have voiced similar concerns, too. (See, e.g., here and here.)

But just yesterday, The Wall Street Journal published this piece reporting on Chinese words and deeds indicating that Beijing opposed any Russian invasion of Ukraine. You’d think that China would welcome the prospect of significant numbers of American military forces tied down trying to deter an attack by Moscow on Ukraine, or on nearby members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), or getting caught up in any fighting that does break out. The result of any of these situations would be an America less able to resist Chinese designs on Taiwan forcibly.

It’s unimaginable that Chinese leaders have forgotten about these benefits of war or a continuing state of high tensions in Ukraine’s neighborhood. But according to the Journal, Beijing has decided for the time being that it’s more important to avoid further antagonizing the United States on the trade and broader economic fronts – specifically by helping Russia cushion the blows of any western sanctions. China is also supposedly uncomfortable with the idea of countries successfully intervening in the internal affairs of other countries – because of its own vulnerability on the human rights front, and because it regards foreign (including U.S.) support for Taiwan as unacceptable interference in its internal affairs, too (since it views Taiwan as a renegade province).

Not that China isn’t already acting to prop up Russia’s economy – specifically agreeing earlier this month to buy huge amounts of Russian oil and gas. But if Beijing has indeed decided to go no further, or not much further, the potential effectiveness of western sanctions on Moscow would be that much greater. It would also signal that the Biden adminisration has much greater leverage than it apparently realizes to use tariffs to punish China for various economic transgressions – e.g., failing to keep its promises under former President Trump’s Phase One trade deal to meet targets for ramping up its imports from the United States.

>Speaking of sanctions, the Biden administration view of these measures keeps getting stranger, too. The President and his aides have repeatedly insisted that the best time for imposing them is after a Russian invasion of Ukraine, because acting beforehand would “lose the deterrent effect.”

But this reasoning makes no sense because it – logically, anyway – assumes that the sanctions that would be slapped on would achieve little or nothing in the way of inflicting economic pain powerful enough either to induce a Russian pullback or convince the Kremlin that further aggression along these lines wouldn’t be worth the costs.

After all, pre-invasion sanctions would be taking their toll while the Russians were fighting in Ukraine, and until they pulled out or made some other meaningful concession. The Biden position, however, seems to be that in fact, during this post-invasion period, they’d be taking scarcely any toll at all – or at least not one significant enough to achieve any of their declared aims. If that’s the case, though, why place any stock in them at all at any time?

>One reason for these evidently low Biden sanctions expectations is surely that, at least for now, the administration isn’t willing to promise that the potentially most effective punishments will be used. Nor are key U.S. allies.

Principally, last Friday, Deputy National Security Adviser Daleep Singh told reporters that banning Russia from the global banking system would “probably not” be part of an initial sanctions package. And Germany keeps hemming and hawing about ending the Nordstream 2 gas pipeline project even if Russia does invade.

The Germans – and the rest of Europe – are now acting like they’re taking seriously the need to reduce their reliance on Russian natural gas (which currently supplies some forty percent of their supplies of this fossil fuel. But Berlin has still not committed to cancelling its plans to buy even more gas from Russia via the recently completed Nordstream channel. (The pipeline isn’t yet in use because the Germans are in fact dragging their feet on final regulatory approval.) Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock has declared that Nordstream is “on the table” for her if the Russians move militarily. But nothing even like this non-promise has been made by Prime Minister Olaf Scholz. And last Friday, Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi said he opposes including energy in anti-Russia sanctions.

>The final puzzle: Although Poland is a linchpin of NATO’s strategy for preventing any Putin aggression beyond Ukraine, the European Union has just moved a major step closer to cutting the country off from the massive economic aid it receives from the grouping, and indeed has already frozen $41 billion in CCP Virus recovery funds it had previously allotted to Warsaw.

The decisions stem from Poland’s alleged backsliding on commitments it made to protect human rights in order to join the EU, but blocking these resources isn’t exactly likely to strengthen Poland’s ability to aid in the effort to contain Russia, and Ukraine itself is hardly a model democracy (see, e.g., here and here) – all of which can’t help but scramble the politics of the crisis in Eastern Europe yet further. And all of which should be added to the already impressive list of paradoxes, ironies, mysteries, and curiosities that everyone should keep in mind whenever they hear about the future of Europe, the global liberal order, world peace, and human freedom itself being at stake in Ukraine.    

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: The Fatally Flawed Claims that Trump’s China Trade Policies Flopped

18 Friday Feb 2022

Posted by Alan Tonelson in (What's Left of) Our Economy

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China, Donald Trump, European Union, non-oil goods trade deficit, Phase One, tariffs, Trade, trade deficit, trade war, {What's Left of) Our Economy

With charges of spreading misinformation and false narratives in the air once again (not that it’s been entirely absent at any point in recent years), I’d be remiss if I didn’t spotlight a major example of the latter in particular) that’s appeared in the last week or so concerning former President Trump’s Phase One trade deal with China.

Since two years have now passed since Phase One officially went into effect, claims have mushroomed in the Mainstream Media that it’s been a complete failure. (See, notably, here, here, and here.) These claims aren’t new, and they’re not all bunk. For example, it’s true that the Chinese have fallen well short of importing as many U.S. goods as promised. But conspicuously missing in these analyses is the larger and much more important truth that the Trump China trade policies writ large have spurred major progress toward a central declared objective – bringing under control the ginormous American merchandise trade deficit with the People’s Republic.

As known by RealityChek readers, during the 2020-2021 period that represents the only full year period since Phase One began, the U.S. goods trade shortfall with China rose by 14.52 percent. The closest global proxy, the U.S. non-oil goods deficit, was up 15.66 percent. And the U.S. performance doubtless would have been considerably better had decades of neglect of health security by pre-Trump presidents not forced the nation to import massive amounts of personal protective equipment and other CCP Virus-related medical goods from China.

Moreover, since China’s first year (2002) as a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO), through 2019, the U.S. merchandise deficit with China increased by 234.07 percent. During that same period, the U.S. non-oil goods gap increased by 122.99 percent. So under Trump, a trend that had lasted nearly two decades was reversed – to China’s detriment. And clearly, the stiff tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars worth of Chinese products imposed by the former President – which were left completely intact under Phrase One – deserve major credit.

In addition, as reported in the Financial Times on Tuesday, between 2020 and 2021, the European Union’s (EU) merchandise deficit with China ballooned by 36 percent. That’s nearly 2.5 times more than the widening of the U.S.-China gap. And although Beijing lacks unfettered entry into the EU market, Brussels has erected nothing like the Trump tariffs to slow imports from China. In other words, EU trade with China is a clear control group for U.S. trade with China, and the latter dramatically outperformed. 

It’s legitimate of course to claim that bilateral trade deficits don’t matter, and that the trade war conducted by Trump harmed the nation on net (although the evidence is shaky or non-existent when it comes to metrics like output and employment in the trade-heavy U.S. manufacturing, or inflation in the overall economy).

But arguing that Trump’s China trade policy had no effect on U.S.-China trade flows or the China trade gap, or left the former President’s goals on this front unmet, says nothing useful about the state of bilateral commerce, but speaks volumes about the biases of the critics.

Following Up: Podcast Now On-Line of National Radio Interview Grading Trump’s China Trade Policy

17 Thursday Feb 2022

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Following Up

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CBS Eye on the World with John Batchelor, China, Donald Trump, Following Up, John Batchelor, tariffs, Trade, trade deficit, trade war

I’m pleased to announce that the podcast of my interview last night on the nationally syndicated “CBS Eye on the World” with John Batchelor is now on-line.

Click here for a timely discussion of whether former President Trump’s 2020 trade deal with China – which has now been in effect for two years – and broader strategy for grappling with the People’s Republic on trade really was the flop so many critics continue to claim – or even close.

And keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments.

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