President Donald Trump's approach to China is a "hot mess" with virtually no hope of progress, Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote in an analysis published on Monday.
This comes a few weeks after Trump threatened a 100 percent tariff on Chinese goods in an attempt to get the country's leader, Xi Jinping, to come to the table — something that so far has borne little fruit.
"Trump succeeded in bringing about a cease-fire in Gaza because he gained leverage over both Israel and Hamas — and he used it adroitly," wrote Friedman, arguing that Trump understands leverage from his time in real estate. However, "he has failed to bring about a cease-fire in Ukraine, because he has refused to use all the leverage he has on Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who started the war."
It's the same story in China, where, Friedman wrote, the president's strategy "to employ the leverage of tariffs to reduce China’s manufacturing exports to America — more necessary today than ever — has shown only limited gains largely because of the chaotic way Trump has gone about putting those tariffs into place."
To understand the problem, Friedman said, you have to understand where the Chinese economy is currently sitting, which isn't great.
"As a result of the devastating bursting of China’s housing bubble over the last few years, millions of Chinese have lost significant amounts of money and become burdened with debt," wrote Friedman — with the result that consumer spending has cratered. "Chinese are also importing even less from abroad. Beijing’s response is not to stimulate domestic consumption — by giving its people something more than the bare minimums in social security and health care — but instead to fund the building of more factories to export goods to the rest of the world."
This is a "reckless" move by China, Friedman argued, and Trump is right to be concerned — but he didn't think through any of these threats. Most importantly, he said, "I suspect that Trump started announcing his new tariffs on China without ever asking any expert whether China could retaliate in any meaningful way — aside from stopping purchases of American soybeans." In reality, China can do much more to the U.S. than that, by cutting off the flow of rare earth minerals needed for our own energy and technology production.
"Given how important the U.S.-China relationship has been for sustaining the relative Great Power peace and prosperity of the world since the late 1970s, Washington and Beijing need a quiet long-term dialogue — not a noisy long-term trade war in which both sides lose," Friedman concluded. "If we really are heading for a divorce in this relationship, oh my goodness, we will miss it when it’s gone."