Analysis: Donald Trump’s tariff onslaught against China launches a battle

CNN
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President Donald Trump just ignited a direct showdown with the one nation that might be able to beat the United States in a trade war.

Trump’s escalation against China — which is about to face tariffs of at least 104% on goods entering the US — is the most serious pivot yet in his global tariff onslaught and has the most potential to inflict severe blowback on American citizens in soaring prices.

The confrontation follows years of US attempts to address perceived trade abuses by China. It’s also the culmination of a decade or more of worsening relations prompted by an aggressive and nationalistic shift by a Pacific competitor turned hostile superpower that now seems itching to challenge US might.

And it’s a dark landmark in a diplomatic relationship that will help define the 21st century and a breakdown for a long US project to prevent tensions erupting into a full-on trade war — or potentially much worse — between two giants.

The US has been trying to manage China’s emergence for more than 50 years — since President Richard Nixon’s pioneering visit to Chairman Mao Zedong to “open” an isolated and impoverished nation and to drive a wedge between its leaders and their communist brethren in the Soviet Union. It’s been nearly a quarter-century since another milestone: when the US ushered China into the World Trade Organization in hopes of promoting democratic change and locking it into a rules-based, Western-oriented economic system.

The ultimate failure of those well-intentioned efforts is being laid bare in Trump’s second term. The president rose to power on a populist wave that was partly a reaction to globalization that exported US industrial jobs to China and left blight in its wake.

Trump claims that scores of nations are eager to make trade deals to defray painful US tariffs.

But China isn’t joining their ranks.

Beijing rebuffed Trump’s warning not to retaliate against an earlier 34% tariff on top of a first round of duties — warning that it was ready to fight to “the end.” The US leader, caught up in a fast-spiraling clash with President Xi Jinping, then had to preserve his credibility by making good on his threat to impose a gargantuan import tax from goods from the world’s second-largest economy on Wednesday.

“Countries like China who have chosen to retaliate and try to double down on their mistreatment of American workers are making a mistake,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday. “President Trump has a spine of steel, and he will not break, and America will not break under his leadership.”

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