Donald Trump caught between his wall and a hard place – China. And Beijing is watching his negotiations very closely
- Robert Boxwell says Trump is stuck. If he strikes a deal with Beijing, it may hurt his re-election chances in 2020. If he doesn’t, Wall Street will punish him. Meanwhile, Beijing is monitoring his border wall negotiations, to see if he will sell out
This economic war caused substantial harm to millions of American workers and many US businesses, but because it involved no shooting, and because the country’s business elite profited from it, presidents from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama never mounted a defence.
Trump did, and the world started taking a close look at China’s trade practices. Read the comments sections of articles on the trade war and you may find even diehard Trump haters grudgingly giving him credit for standing up to Beijing. Even among readers of the liberal papers Trump so loathes, “I really don’t like the guy, but…” comments are not uncommon.
His tweets indicate he seems to want a trade deal, or credit for one anyway. But his base would probably give him more credit if he could walk away.
Beijing has made multiple promises to give market access to US companies and to protect their intellectual property since George H.W. Bush’s administration first pushed the issue in 1992, but these have constantly come up short.
And over time, what the US calls Chinese state-sponsored theft of US intellectual property has grown into a national security issue. Accepting yet another promise from Beijing to change its trade behaviour would make Trump, in the eyes of his base, just another naive president or a sell-out.
But if he accepts Beijing’s terms and declares victory, and the two sides go back to something resembling business as usual, Washington is effectively going to keep “giving wings to a tiger to strengthen it” – which is exactly what the Chinese called the US’ Soviet Union policy way back in 1978.
To Trump’s supporters, the US has been feeding a new tiger, China, for a quarter of a century now, and the new tiger doesn’t seem to envision a world where Western liberal values will have much of a place.
Nobody outside the US is watching the Mexico wall negotiations more closely than China. Beijing is weighing Trump’s fortitude, trying to assess whether he has the ultimate tool in the dealmaker’s toolbox – the ability to walk away from a bad deal – or whether he’ll cave in, like those before him but then tweet about a “victory”.
The US loses something either way. Whether it’s short term and economic or long term and societal depends on Trump.
Good luck sleeping tonight.
Robert Boxwell is director of the consultancy Opera Advisors