Cold War II

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

President Reagan won the Cold War.  The Soviet Union collapsed.  He did it by ramping up American military spending, knowing the Soviets would have to try to keep up.  They spent themselves into oblivion.
America is finally waking up to the fact it has been engaged in a Cold War with China for years, but we weren’t really fighting, perhaps because some of our leading lights were making a ton of money off China (looking at you, Joe Biden). 
President Trump is fighting the Chinese Cold War using tariffs.  And it’s working.
Earlier this year, China threatened to fight back by dumping US debt, which they claimed would destroy our economy.  It wouldn’t and both sides know it, that’s a bluff and dis-information for Democrats to use to beat Trump for fighting a war they don’t want him to win.  At worst, the US would repudiate the debt, cleaning up our books and leaving China with no leverage and no asset.
Now, President Trump has exercised his power to ban certain companies from doing business with Chinese.
Here’s the quandary for Democrats:  do they acknowledge the war and help the President fight it?  Or do they bring down the President to install their own party which will rule over the rubble of the country they sold out?
Joe Doakes

The answer to Joe’s last question? They go for power. Whatever that means.

34 thoughts on “Cold War II

  1. It is a war, and “trade” is only part of it. The Chinese are trying to expand their military presence in the Pacific by claiming and/or building islands, and they tried to buy or lease a portion of Greenland for bases. (Yuk, yuk, Greenland, isn’t that funny!). It takes money to do all that, and Trump is attacking China’s “weapons” of warfare. Oh that crazy, bad, Orange Man!

  2. What Trump hasn’t appreciated is, unlike Honduras or Guatemala, who’ll cave to pressure, the Chinese are willing to eat grass before conceding to intimidation. He has zero appreciation for what the other side in a negotiation can do and has not thought through next steps and countermoves a single jot. Another reason (among many) he is completely unfit for office.

    Whether they have to wait one year or five years to see the back of Trump’s term the Chinese will be content to sit it out. Trump has absolutely no idea what he is up against.

  3. Emery, keep in mind that the up & coming generation in China has no memory of the Cultural Revolution and only a fairly foggy memory (if any) of Tianeman Square (sp?). They do, however, have a pretty vivid memory of the homes their parents had, and the meals they ate as children, and I would guess just might respond pretty negatively if they were called upon to “eat grass”, as you say, to support septuagenarian dictators struggling for global position vs. the U.S. It’s the same kind of difference we saw between the Germany of 1940 and the Germany of 1990.

  4. Some previous administration worked out a trade agreement that created a counterweight to China’s outsize market the smart way. I think it was called Trans-Pacific Partnership.

    That same administration managed to assemble an unlikely coalition of our erstwhile friends and allies [those were the days!] as well as strategic challengers to corral Iranian nuclear ambitions peacefully. It was quite a signal achievement.

    Never mind, we’ve found our national political opioid: this absurd abusive clown in the White House turning America inside out.

  5. China could implode any time. If we are so dependent on China that our economy will collapse w/o the Chinese buying our bonds & ag goodies, we better adjust now. The US has the world’s most successful economy, not China.
    The other day I heard a libertarian economist (from Cato) say that the impact of a tariff on the US economy is the value of that tariff squared.
    This is utter nonsense. That formula is not proven, it is one of those crazy rules of thumb that has no empirical basis and is repeated over and over again.

  6. We’ve hosted a number of Chinese grad students over the years, and a couple of even become “family”. We see and talk with them frequently. It was never a regular topic of conversation, but when it has come up, a few had “heard” about Tienanmen Square, but didn’t know anything about it.

    To bikebubba’s comment, the students who come here are from wealthy families. Last fall, one of our “daughters” who is working in the States said that her parents were very concerned about the tariffs and the effects they were having on their income and life. (She found the book, The Red Azalea, very interesting as it is set during the time when her parents were young adults in Mao’s China). I would guess that their generation isn’t too willing to “eat grass”. Certainly the Hong Kongers don’t find Chinese rule very appetizing right now.

  7. BTW, no dem candidate supports TPP. All say they would use tariffs against against China to fight its IP theft and currency manipulation.
    For some reason this does not make the news. It would interfere with the anti-Trump narrative, I suppose.
    China has not demonstrated that it can successfully transition to a modern, slow to moderate growth economy. It also has important demographic and cultural problems. China has sought to address its relative poverty in resources by building a mercantilist empire. We’ll see how that goes; it’s possible you may soon see Chinese troops deployed to Africa and SE Asia to enforce contract terms that were signed by local despots.

  8. My feeling is that China has decided that there is no deal to be had with the Trump administration. That means their best option is making sure he is not re-elected through an economic assault on his base. I hope I am wrong but otherwise we could be in for a painful next 15 months. That too shall pass but in the meantime it is not going to be fun.

  9. <iWhat Trump hasn’t appreciated is, unlike Honduras or Guatemala, who’ll cave to pressure, the Chinese are willing to eat grass before conceding to intimidation.

    Tell that to the 300 million peasant farmers Emery. The commies in government dont care but if this trade war continues, what happened in Hong Kong will be happening in Bejing ten fold. The elite have to keep their subjects happy. If they dont there will be a uprising.

  10. Never mind, we’ve found our national political opioid: this absurd abusive clown in the White House turning America inside out.

    But Obama left over 2 years ago.

  11. I think this demonstrates with much greater certainty that China is playing the long game: wait out Trump, tax his constituency via tariffs, and hope he loses re-election in order to negotiate with a sane president in 2021.

    But other than that, this is a case study of tremendously poor management of international relations. If one wants change in China’s behavior, the effective way to go about it, is to gather allies (Europe, much of Asia & beyond) come to a common position & stick together.

    Instead, in Trump we have an unpredictable, ineffective narcissist who insults, threatens & forces allies to turn away. Not a very clever way to achieve US goals.

  12. Chinese have common sense. If they are truly banking on Trump losing in 2020 that flies in 2 millenia of their reasoning. Their econmy cant wait that long and they know it. Stop reading left wing drivel Emery.

  13. Let me repeat myself: “BTW, no dem candidate supports TPP. All say they would use tariffs against against China to fight its IP theft and currency manipulation.”
    Hillary rejected the TPP in the summer of 2016. The populist revolt against the elites is real.
    And, any how, Emery has shown no ability at all to make accurate predictions about politics or the direction of the US economy.

  14. This is either going to outlast Trump or Trump is going to cave and call that caving — #winning to try to avoid entering the campaign in a recession.

  15. Says the guy who said Trump cannot win and that Mueller will bring down Trump. When this turns out to be strike 3 Emery will you stop trying to predict anything Trump related?

  16. It’s late overseas you should clock out for the day. You’ve hit your troll quota already.

  17. sorry to disappoint you Emery, I live in MN and am not paid by anyone in Russia, wish I was. It would make doing this much more satisfying.

  18. “He has zero appreciation for what the other side in a negotiation can do and has not thought through next steps and countermoves a single jot. ”

    On the contrary: I think he is better suited at negotiation (and coming out on top in said negotiation) than any president since Teddy Roosevelt. No president after WWII has come into office with as much negotiating practice and success as Trump has had. Obama? He didn’t negotiate. He bowed to other world leaders. Of course they liked him because he kept their footwear clean, except for the saliva streaks.

    Saying Trump doesn’t know negotiating is like saying Henry Ford didn’t know anything about manufacturing or automobiles.

  19. It’s really kinda amazing how lame E-man’s arguments are. And then as a final parting shot, PoD is accused of being a (Russian?) bot. Really?

  20. “My feeling is that China has decided that there is no deal to be had with the Trump administration. That means their best option is making sure he is not re-elected through an economic assault on his base.” – Emery

    China colluding with the Democrats to interfere in our election, cheered on by our resident expert on Why Everything About Trump Is Bad.

  21. The two groups Trump promised to help the most — farmers and manufacturers — ironically seem to be the two groups suffering the most under the trade policies of Trump.

    US soc@ilism and welfarism with Trump characteristics. Not what I signed up for.

  22. JDM, I almost consider it a compliment someone probably close to twice my age cant engage in a debate so he calls me a Russian bot. I also consider it a win.

  23. Trump did not promise to help farmers the most. Prove me wrong – post the link to a campaign speech where he did.

    Everybody wants to cut wasteful government subsidies . . . for the other guy. I grew up in a farming community. I’ve been hearing farmers complain about how bad they have it, for decades. Haven’t gotten a fair price since Parity. And yet, farm kids always seem to be able to afford new pickups to drive to school, with a new snowmobile in the back. And farms never sit empty for lack of buyers, like houses in Detroit. I conclude farmers simply like to complain. National trade policy should not be set by complainers.

  24. Where I grew up — in Fridley and the exurbs of the Twin Cities — the saying was that farmers “were born cryin’.”

  25. Trump is crushing the farmers with bad policies and then giving them billions in taxpayer dollars to buy their votes.

    These subsidies are unsustainable, and farmers know it. Their long term interests are being sacrificed to enable Trump to pursue an incoherent trade policy that ultimately will achieve nothing for the country or its agricultural sector. They are like soldiers being asked to die in a war that has already been lost.

  26. Let’s see if the Chinese will give us a heads up on the American presidential candidates who will be acceptable in 2024. No use wasting everybody’s time by choosing people the Chinese communist party opposes, right?

  27. If one country is able to dictate the politics in another country, you know what that is called?
    Colonization.
    I think that Emery reads stuff from “experts” (probably in that catalog of horrors called The economist) and then sets his panic dial to eleven, without ever making a rudimentary analysis of what he has been told is “true.”
    Empirical data is king. Economists, as group, hate the empirical. They want to dazzle you with their brilliant theories. They don’t want you to see if they actually have a record of making correct predictions. When they are cornered, they have as many excuses as the winner of an Olympic Bronze medal. “There was no way to know that X would happen and throw me off . . . I missed the Silver and the gold by a really tiny amount . . . ” Some people want very, very badly to believe that the “experts” have all the answers, and they continue to believe the “experts” even when empirical evidence shows that they don’t know what the Hell they are talking about.

  28. Poor Emery,

    Apparently he missed the agricultural deal that he just NEGOTIATED with Japan, opening their markets to U. S. beef for the first time in at least a decade. Further, the will be buying about $10 million worth of U.S. corn. It’s too bad that our allies hate Trump so much.

  29. Trump was desperate to strike a deal because the US was losing out against competitors in the TPP and EU countries in their export drive into the Japanese market. Trump preferred to call it a FTA, but Japan resisted. This is because they still hope the US will join TPP. But this is not a “mini deal”. It’s comprehensive enough to meet the GATT/WTO rule to qualify as a FTA. The USA is not getting any better deal than they would have been if they had stayed in TPP. But this deal help save face for Trump.

  30. MP, I’m sure that The Economist falls into that reading list, but I think also the tweets of Rob Reiner:
    So now we have Russians co-signing Trump’s loans. The mountain of Criminality is overwhelming. Impeachment is just the start. Vote him out. Then indict him. America deserves a President who isn’t a Liar, a Racist, and a Traitor.

  31. There’s a difference between making a mistake (and apologizing) and just lying all the time.

  32. If Wal-Mart puts pressure on Del Monte to cut the price of canned corn, Del Monte puts pressure on farmers to accept lower payments which earns them less income, which is a bad thing. Except Wal-Mart passes the savings to customers (including farmers) who have more disposable income to spend on other goods, which is a good thing. So is Wal-Mart acting for bad or for good? Both, of course, and neither, because the answer requires balance and nuance and a combination of broad versus narrow perspective and short-term versus long-term thinking. It’s not as simple as “Wal-Mart Bad!”

    Now, applying that lesson to international trade: when Trump puts pressure on China . . . .

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