On Mar 1, 2025, at 6:27 PM, Todd Pierce via Salon <salon@listserve.com> wrote:
Good points Warren, showing you're not a "true libertarian," even if you might call yourself one, but are an "economist," which libertarian ideologues are anything but (and overlooking some other points you've made in the past on AEI, and Milton Friedman :-)On Mar 1, 2025, at 4:14 PM, Warren Coats via Salon <salon@listserve.com> wrote:What should DOGE do? https://wcoats.blog/2025/03/01/econ-101-budget-cuts/--Warren Coats1211 S Eads St. Apt 2101Arlington Va. 22202(703) 608-2975https://wcoats.blogOn Mar 1, 2025, at 6:10 PM, Mayraj Fahim via Salon <salon@listserve.com> wrote:Trump is behaving as if well tutored by Roy Kohn. But US coerciveness has become increasingly obvious. And Biden was also willing to do a hit job like the mafia as Nordstream destruction revealed and shocked countries. Then there is the capture of foreign assets.--On Sunday, March 2, 2025 at 03:37:41 AM GMT+5, Chas Freeman via Salon <salon@listserve.com> wrote:--Illustration: Derek Abella for Bloomberg
Weekend EssayIt’s Xi Jinping’s World, and Trump Is Just Living in It
As Donald Trump blows up the rules-based order, China is pulling ahead in the global battle for ideas.
February 27, 2025On a frigid Alaskan day in March 2021, shortly after Joe Biden took office, top US and Chinese diplomats gathered at the Hotel Captain Cook in Anchorage for a meeting that quickly went off the rails.
Such gatherings usually follow a script: Journalists are let into the room, both sides make a few banal opening comments, and then they get down to business once the cameras are gone. In this case, they engaged in a 71-minute sparring match over the international order, drawn out as translators tried to accurately convey the blunt messaging amid stony, awkward stares by both sides.
What really incensed the visitors from Beijing were comments by then Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who accused China of “economic coercion” against US allies, and lambasted actions in Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Taiwan that “threaten the rules-based order that maintains global stability.” He called for that system to be strengthened and said the alternative “is a world in which might makes right and winners take all.”
China’s top diplomat at the time, Yang Jiechi, fired back with a lengthy retort saying his nation follows “the United Nations-centered international system.” The US, he said, “does not represent the world” and many nations don’t recognize “the universal values advocated by the United States.”
“The United States has its United States-style democracy and China has Chinese-style democracy,” Yang said.
Antony Blinken (second from right) speaks to Yang Jiechi (second from left) at the opening session of US-China talks in Anchorage, Alaska on March 18, 2021.Photographer: Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty ImagesFour years on, with Donald Trump back in the White House, the back-and-forth almost looks quaint. Blinken’s talk of a “rules-based order” has been replaced with a doctrine of “America first” and “peace through strength.” Trump has threatened friends and foes alike with tariffs, pushed to somehow acquire Greenland and the Gaza Strip, and called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy — who has spent the past three years fighting off an invasion by Vladimir Putin’s Russia — a “dictator.”
“It’s really peace through strength,” Trump said last week. “Because without the strength it’s going to be very hard to have peace.”
Trump has also questioned the very essence of the rule of law, declaring on social media that “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law” — a quote often attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte.
A little more than a month into Trump’s second term, the clear line that divided the US and China in Alaska is now blurred, if not completely erased. Trump’s understanding of power — demanding fealty and showing he is prepared to use coercion to achieve his aims — is arguably more in line with China’s vision of the world than any US president since the establishment of the UN in the wake of World War II. That shift is putting Chinese President Xi Jinping ahead in the global battle of ideas.
In China, all politicians, soldiers, judges, bureaucrats and business titans answer to the Communist Party, a form of control that will be on display next week at the annual gathering of China’s legislature, the National People’s Congress. Xi’s government has spent billions creating an Orwellian surveillance state to monitor citizens and snuff out dissent before it can threaten the Party. Laws serve as tools to maintain power, and access to China’s market of 1.4 billion consumers is wielded as a weapon to achieve geopolitical aims.
But whereas Xi flexes every bit of state muscle to ensure no one can challenge the Party’s power, Trump is using all levers of American economic and military might to keep the US ahead of China as the world’s preeminent superpower. While that strategy may prove successful in the short term, in the long run his actions are creating a world much more aligned with China’s interests.
Xi Jinping and Donald Trump attend a welcoming ceremony in Beijing in 2017.Photographer: Thomas Peter-Pool/Getty ImagesAt the top of the crumbly slopes of Sharp Peak, one of the highest points in Hong Kong, one can look down into the scenic waters of Mirs Bay along the coast of southern China. It was from this body of water more than 100 years ago that the US would reshape the geopolitical map of Asia, in no small part because China couldn’t control its own coastline at the time.
After President William McKinley — a Trump favorite — put a naval blockade on Spanish-held Cuba in 1898, US forces stationed in British-controlled Hong Kong had 48 hours to leave the city, as international law forbade neutral ports from giving ammunition and fuel to nations at war. So Commodore George Dewey floated out of Victoria Harbor 30 miles up the coast into Chinese waters to prepare his fleet to attack Spanish forces in Manila.
Writing later about the blatant move to sidestep global rules, Dewey said: “We appreciated that so loosely organized a national entity as the Chinese empire could not enforce the neutrality laws.”
Later that year, the US would acquire the Philippines and Guam from Spain, and separately annex Hawaii — all locations that remain strategically important in American efforts to counter China. Beijing refers to that period, when colonial forces took control of ports up and down its coast, as the Century of Humiliation. And it’s embedded deep into the nation’s political psyche to this day.
During trade talks in Trump’s first term, he attempted to force Xi into submission with demands for changes to several Chinese laws, including those related to intellectual property protections and forced technology transfers. Nationalists in China were outraged, and at one point compared Xi’s top trade negotiator to a Qing dynasty official who in 1895 signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki with Japan. That agreement remains a source of national shame because it obligated China to open more ports to foreign trade and to cede territory, including Taiwan.
Xi ended up resisting Trump’s demands, and the US president eventually settled for what was termed a “Phase One” trade deal largely tied to purchases of US agricultural goods ahead of the 2020 election. Then came Covid-19, tanking US-China ties and ultimately Trump’s chances at victory.
Trump’s first term left China wounded. Its Foreign Ministry had adopted a more aggressive tone to counter his daily barbs, hurting the country’s global image with what became known as “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy. As Trump jabbed Beijing by calling Covid-19 the “China virus,” Xi adopted some of the world’s strictest controls on movement in part to show the nation’s superiority in controlling the outbreak. That zero-tolerance policy ultimately led to simultaneous, spontaneous street protests — the biggest public display of dissent against Xi and the Communist Party in years.
At the start of his second term, Trump appears to be in a stronger position than he was eight years ago. He has already slapped 10% tariffs on all Chinese imports, and threatened another 10% on top of that next week. They may go up even further as he weighs more sweeping moves to maintain US economic, military and technological supremacy.
At the same time, Trump has indicated he’s open for a deal with China. He’s suggested some demands — he wants China to approve a sale of TikTok and help end Russia’s war in Ukraine — but it’s unclear if he’ll push up against Xi’s red lines on sovereignty. While Trump has surrounded himself with plenty of China hawks, his closest confidante these days appears to be Elon Musk, who has extensive business interests in the world’s second-biggest economy.
So far, Xi is playing it cool. He appears to have learned lessons from round one of the trade war, when China was caught flat-footed in negotiations and took the bait from Trump’s provocations. Unlike leaders such as Canada’s Justin Trudeau, who ran to Trump to stave off tariffs, he has thus far rebuffed requests for another phone call with the US president. While Xi would likely take a quick deal if its terms were not too painful, his long-game goal is building a China that can’t be pushed around by the US.
Like most Americans, the majority of Chinese just want to find good jobs, eat out on the weekends, buy nice things, travel the world, ensure their kids get a quality education and spend time with their families. Those aspirations make up the core piece of China’s social contract: Cede political control to the Communist Party in return for the prospect of a more comfortable life.
But over the past few years, the relationship between the Party and China’s citizens has been strained. A slumping property market, a crackdown on the private sector and weak consumer spending have put the country on pace for the longest streak of deflation since the 1960s, helping to knock China off its trajectory of overtaking the US as the world’s biggest economy by 2030.
The one bright spot has been exports. Xi has cranked up China’s manufacturing machine to historic levels to buoy growth and dominate emerging industries like electric cars, batteries and solar panels. But Trump’s tariffs threaten that strategy, and other nations may follow suit to stop Chinese exports flooding the world.
The NPC gathering next week will provide a blueprint for Xi’s plans to get the domestic economy moving again in a more protectionist world. While that’s expected to include measures to ramp up consumption, helping China mitigate persistent US demands to rebalance the economy, Xi still wants to retain a strong manufacturing sector — primarily as a source of jobs and innovation, but also for national security.
Somewhat ironically, leaders in Beijing are wary of repeating the “China shock” that decimated jobs in America’s Rust Belt and contributed to Trump’s rise. The US leader is now trying to rebuild the US’s manufacturing prowess, threatening tariffs in strategic areas like chips in a bid to win investments, all while seeking to tighten export controls to prevent China from obtaining advanced technology. So far those have failed to block China from accessing cutting-edge chips, allowing DeepSeek to reach a breakthrough on AI that has spurred new optimism among investors.
For Xi, a healthy industrial sector is also key to producing weapons and energy. Solar panels and batteries, for instance, could reduce reliance on imported fossil fuels if the US and its allies ever attempt to cut off supplies in any war over Taiwan — long the biggest flashpoint between the US and China.
Trump’s statements indicate that he’ll avoid fights with strategic adversaries like Russia and China unless core US interests are directly threatened — a worrying prospect for long-time allies in Europe and East Asia, as well as Taiwan. If the US ends up handing Putin a win in Ukraine, that raises the question of whether the country would come to Taiwan’s defense if China invades.
Yet even if Trump gave Xi a green light to seize Taiwan tomorrow, a full-fledged shooting war is unlikely. Another key feature of China’s social contract involves keeping people safe, and any major violence is a political problem for the Party. Ever since China’s military killed hundreds and possibly thousands of protesters in Tiananmen Square, the Communist Party’s preferred method for imposing its will has been extreme coercion rather than bloody conflict. In both Hong Kong and Xinjiang, for example, Xi has used draconian laws, surveillance, mass detentions and other repressive measures to quell dissent, rather than deadly crackdowns.
Even if Xi believes he can win a war over Taiwan quickly and avoid a protracted fight that could threaten the Communist Party, the potential for widespread civilian deaths from retaliatory strikes in major coastal cities like Shanghai risks it backfiring. Chinese officials will say on the record that all of China’s people are prepared to fight and die for the motherland, but privately they acknowledge that the nation isn’t anywhere near ready for war.
What’s more, any US-backed sanctions would jeopardize Xi’s broader target of ensuring China’s per capita gross domestic product is on par with a “mid-level developed country” by 2035, and that the country is leading the world in “international influence” by the middle of this century.
Premier Li Qiang will likely focus on those overarching goals next week at the NPC. While a few paragraphs about Taiwan justifiably attract media attention every year, the bulk of his 13,700-word speech in 2024 was spent outlining ways to improve the lives of ordinary citizens, including things like boosting the quality of soil for farmers, installing elevators in aging residential compounds and fostering “a love of reading among our people.”
Buildings in Xiamen on mainland China stand across the Taiwan Strait from anti-landing barriers on a beach in Kinmen, Taiwan.Photographer: An Rong Xu/BloombergIn China’s eyes, Trump is simply more honest than other administrations about America’s desire for hegemony.
The US has a long history of ignoring international rules that conflict with its strategic interests, a version of American exceptionalism that Chinese officials regularly criticize. Even so, the US has at least been able to argue that its rule-breaking was necessary for some greater good, that it was only trying to protect democracy against authoritarianism, keep the world safe from terrorists or quickly end a war that would otherwise kill many more people.
With Trump, even the pretension of moral authority is out the window. His United States is one where Ukraine provoked Russia into war, where European lawmakers are a bigger security threat than Russia and China, where alliances are protection rackets, where sovereignty is negotiable and where nearly any oppression of the weak can be justified in the name of national interest.
All of that fits with China’s strategic interests, including its opposition to formal military alliances, restrictions on civil liberties in the name of national security and territorial claims in the South China Sea, Taiwan and elsewhere on its periphery. Yang, the Chinese diplomat who sparred with US officials in Alaska, articulated China’s position back in 2010, when he shocked Southeast Asia by declaring: “China is a big country and other countries are small countries, and that’s just a fact.”
Military delegates arrive for the closing of the Second Session of the 14th National People's Congress (NPC) at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, on March 11, 2024.Photographer: BloombergThis wider convergence between the US and China was on display this week at the UN, when both countries agreed on a Security Council resolution on Ukraine that didn’t blame Putin for starting the war. For China, which has reaped perhaps more economic benefits from the rules-based order than any country, this is exactly how the global body should operate: Major powers divide the world into spheres of influence and find ways to resolve problems without any high-minded appeals to universal human rights.
Although Trump’s wrecking ball to global norms may deal some short-term blows to China, particularly on trade, ultimately he’s ushering in a much more comfortable world for the Communist Party. Trump’s threats of military and economic coercion to acquire Greenland, for example, provide Xi with a less bloody model to assert control over Taiwan than Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
And in the overall contest for power, Xi has one major advantage over Trump: At 71, the Chinese leader is seven years younger, and he never needs to face an election.
That effectively means Xi can wait out Trump until the pendulum swings back again in the US. When it does, whoever takes over may find that “Chinese-style democracy” is the norm and “the rules-based order” has fundamentally changed, perhaps forever.
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