Trump’s Trade Threats are really Cold War 2.0

President Trump has threatened China’s President Xi that if they don’t meet and talk at the upcoming G20 meetings in Japan, June 29-30, the United States will not soften its tariff war and economic sanctions against Chinese exports and technology.

Some meeting between Chinese and U.S. leaders will indeed take place, but it cannot be anything like a real negotiation. Such meetings normally are planned in advance, by specialized officials working together to prepare an agreement to be announced by their heads of state. No such preparation has taken place, or can take place. Mr. Trump doesn’t delegate authority.

He opens negotiations with a threat. That costs nothing, and you never know (or at least, he never knows) whether he can get a freebee. His threat is that the U.S. can hurt its adversary unless that country agrees to abide by America’s wish-list. But in this case the list is so unrealistic that the media are embarrassed to talk about it. The US is making impossible demands for economic surrender – that no country could accept. What appears on the surface to be only a trade war is really a full-fledged Cold War 2.0.

America’s wish list: other countries’ neoliberal subservience

At stake is whether China will agree to do what Russia did in the 1990s: put a Yeltsin-like puppet of neoliberal planners in place to shift control of its economy from its government to the U.S. financial sector and its planners. So the fight really is over what kind of planning China and the rest of the world should have: by governments to raise prosperity, or by the financial sector to extract revenue and impose austerity.

U.S. diplomacy aims to make other countries dependent on its agricultural exports, its oil (or oil in countries that U.S. majors and allies control), information and military technology. This trade dependency will enable U.S. strategists to impose sanctions that would deprive economies of basic food, energy, communications and replacement parts if they resist U.S. demands.

The objective is to gain financial control of global resources and make trade “partners” pay interest, licensing fees and high prices for products in which the United States enjoys monopoly pricing “rights” for intellectual property. A trade war thus aims to make other countries dependent on U.S.-controlled food, oil, banking and finance, or high-technology goods whose disruption will cause austerity and suffering until the trade “partner” surrenders.

China’s willingness to give Trump a “win”

Threats are cheap, but Mr. Trump can’t really follow through without turning farmers, Wall Street and the stock market, Walmart and much of the IT sector against him at election time if his tariffs on China increase the cost of living and doing business. His diplomatic threat is really that the US will cut its own economic throat, imposing sanctions on its own importers and investors if China does not acquiesce.

It is easy to see what China’s answer will be. It will stand aside and let the US self-destruct. Its negotiators are quite happy to “offer” whatever China has planned to do anyway, and let Trump brag that this is a “concession” he has won.

China has a great sweetener that I think President Xi Jinping should offer: It can nominate Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. We know that he wants what his predecessor Barack Obama got. And doesn’t he deserve it more? After all, he is helping to bring Eurasia together, driving China and Russia into an alliance with neighboring counties, reaching out to Europe.

Trump may be too narcissistic to realize the irony here. Catalyzing Asian and European trade independence, financial independence, food independence and IT independence from the threat of U.S. sanctions will leave the U.S. isolated in the emerging multilateralism.

America’s wish for a neoliberal Chinese Yeltsin (and another Russian Yeltsin for that matter)

A good diplomat does not make demands to which the only answer can be “No.” There is no way that China will dismantle its mixed economy and turn it over to U.S. and other global investors. It is no secret that the United States achieved world industrial supremacy in the late 19th and early 20th century by heavy public-sector subsidy of education, roads, communication and other basic infrastructure. Today’s privatized, financialized and “Thatcherized” economies are high-cost and inefficient.

Yet U.S. officials persist in their dream of promoting some neoliberal Chinese leader or “free market” party to wreak the damage that Yeltsin and his American advisors wrought on Russia. The U.S. idea of a “win-win” agreement is one in which China will be “permitted” to grow as long as it agrees to become a U.S. financial and trade satellite, not an independent competitor.

Trump’s trade tantrum is that other countries are simply following the same economic strategy that once made America great, but which neoliberals have destroyed here and in much of Europe. U.S. negotiators are unwilling to acknowledge that the United States has lost its competitive industrial advantage and become a high-cost rentier economy. Its GDP is “empty,” consisting mainly of the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) rents, profits and capital gains while the nation’s infrastructure decays and its labor is reduced to a prat-time “gig” economy. Under these conditions the effect of trade threats can only be to speed up the drive by other countries to become economically self-reliant.

by Michael Hudson for the Saker Blog (cross posted by authorization of the author with https://michael-hudson.com/)

6 thoughts on “Trump’s Trade Threats are really Cold War 2.0”

    1. Many “Kudos” for Posting this article Doreen!
      Its is “Dead-On” about WHAT Trump REALLY is…A “Grand Treasonous Traitor”…But I have a Photo of Both Him and Clinton in a trio with a representative of the REAL “Power” that “Controls EVERYTHING ON THIS PLANET…THE WHITE “VICAR OF GOD/CHRIST” ON EARTH…THE VATICAN!
      The very “Creator” of ALL RELIGION Earthwide….and WHITE SUPREMACY!
      ALL of what is ongoing at THIS Moment was “Written-in-Stone” tens of thousands of years ago in Southeast Asia….Written BY and FOR Earth’s ORIGINAL CREATIONS.
      The “MELANIN” BLACK HUMAN BEINGS.
      The “Scenario” depicted in the Movie AVATAR best describes What actually happen when OUR planet was INVADED BY “COSMIC CRIMINAL” CREATURES.

  1. Fear the man with nothing left to lose….
    China, frankly, doesn’t give a damn!
    Whilst the US is/was it’s largest trading partner, Uncle Sam is losing credibility on the world stage as it attempts to enforce it’s unilateral hegemony on the rest of Mankind..The rest of Mankind has had its fill of the self appointed global enforcer, the consequences of which it may never recover…Threatening unilateral annihilation and openly advocating regime changes in sovereign states has reached fever pitch…Liken it to the schoolyard shitstirrer (Bully) the coward, who, when the time comes to step up, disappears from the scene to let his henchmen “hopefully” clean up his mess…Time has come to put this miscreant state back in it’s place…

  2. REMEMBER, Who controls ALL “Corporate Governments” all over the planet?
    The “White Fake God” in the Vatican?…With lots of help from the so-call “Alliance” (Cosmic Criminals)…Managing their web sites (Operation Disclosure.com/ RedefininningGod.com/ The melinialreport.com/Etc.
    Seems like NOTHING this so-called “Alliance” is doing is Stopping ANYTHING leading to a WW3…Hmmmmmmmmmmm? makes-cha kina’wundur huh?
    Chump is so STUPID, he actually fell for that FAKE tanker attack carried out in the middle east LAUGH!!! Witch have been turned into a laughing stock since first reported (Like he didn’t know BEFORE they even were faked???)
    Oh, and by the way…its since been reported too, that CHUMP is PART of that “Swamp” he has promised to “Drain” (Remember???)
    Let see NOW…Obviously the BRICS Alliance has become as useless as “Tits-on-a-Boar-Hog” (Should Know this by Now Folks)
    The “White Fake God” Hiding in the Vatican cannot “Find-a Hooker-in-a-Whorehouse” (Likely because he is their “Pimp”)
    The JUST-US Department works “EXCLUSIVELY” for the “One%’rs”
    The “Bankoholics” are DRUNK with GREED…ALL CONTROLLED BY THE VATICAN.
    JEEPERS!!! That WHITE Fake God must be asleep, Huh Folks?
    ALL wars are ALWAYS preceded by FAKE “Economic Warfare”…UNDERSTAND FOLKS???
    Only this WORLD WAR will NEVER BE “ALLOWED”…UNDERSTAND???
    You would think they would TRY something different, than ANOTHER “Gulf of Tonkin” Horse shit…LAUGH!!!

    1. OOOH I Almost forgot to ASK that White God “HIDING” at the Vatican…Did you make some “‘Mistakes” in your “Creations”…soooooo Bad that YOU Needed be “RE-DEFINED”?!?
      Gosh god, wazya’ uzin’ der’ bathroom whin them’z “Cosmic Criminal’s” snuk in’???
      Cuz ya shur messed up Here whit thim Pleedian’s tryin’ ta phuck up evurthing! Dang!!!

  3. I’ll agree with you that the lower-astral beings who control factions of The Deep State are not very creative/innovative. We humans have the advantage in that regard. However, the people who think Trump is stupid are the ones who are really stupid. Unless you know which faction of The Deep State controls whom, and what that faction is trying to achieve and why, much of what happens will not make sense to you. The only thing you can be sure of is that nothing is what it seems.

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