Simply put, the U.S. business representatives worry that trade problems are being swept under the rug, while the media continue to play up China’s masterfully concocted combinations of real and pie-in-the-sky business deals for American companies.
One of those is Beijing’s well-timed and largely hypothetical deal offered by a possible opening up of China’s financial institutions. Without any attention to the actual meaning of the Chinese statement, the media rejoiced about U.S. investors snapping up the crown jewels of China’s finance.
But that’s not what the Chinese are saying, let alone thinking. The official statement, reported by China’s government news agency, says that there was “no specific timetable … for lifting the equity ownership limit” in joint-venture agreements with foreign investors.
And the game goes on. The huge U.S. trade deficit with China — estimated at about $370 billion for 2017 — is driven by unstoppable and institutionalized dynamics. This year’s trading patterns show that the Chinese want to keep their American purchases growing enough to blunt any possible Washington’s attempt to “kick and rush” the rebalancing of trade accounts.
Trump must be aware of that gambit. But does he realize that “friendly appeals” to China to voluntarily stop raking in hundreds of billions of dollars in its U.S. trade surpluses is a road to nowhere? And if he does, what is he prepared to do about it?
At some point, and probably sooner than most people think, the trade numbers will force Trump to turn the leaf. Things are now happening on his watch, challenging his solemn pledge to stop China “robbing us blind.” Excuses that he inherited the problems won’t do. Americans elected him to stop and solve the policy errors of the past, and to offer new avenues of growing jobs and incomes.
The North Korean issue is of the same piece. Just as Trump committed to cooperate with China on a peaceful denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, Pyongyang’s ambassador to the United Nations chimed in that North Koreans “will not negotiate about their ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons until the U.S. completely stops its hostile policies and nuclear threats against us.”
Do you think that the North Koreans issued such a statement without any consultation with China and Russia, the two world nuclear powers and veto-wielding Security Council members who told the U.S. exactly the same thing in their famous “suspension for suspension” document?
So, will Trump make a total U-turn on North Korea, play nice and cooperate with China in a new format of “head-of-state” diplomacy to bring the Hermit Kingdom back into the world community?
