Trump’s sweeping tariff war may be sold as economic revival, but in reality, it’s a desperate response to America’s fading grip on global power.

Trump has publically proclaimed that the tariffs will reverse decades of “countries taking advantage” of the US, even going so far as to accuse countries like China of stealing from the US for years, claiming that Chinese “unfair trade practices” and “intellectual property theft” were the REAL l reason for its economic rise.

Needless to say, this simplistic narrative overlooks the fact that US corporations, and the US government, willfully sent US manufacturing jobs overseas, particularly to China, as a way to maximize profits by exploiting (at the time) cheap Chinese labor, (dirt cheap) and less strict environmental, labour and safety laws.

I guess they thought it was OK for the Chinese, Vietnamese, and others in Asia to suffer for their benefit.

Unfortunately for the US, such activity inevitably results in transfer of skills, technology and knowledge. What Trump views as “intellectual property theft” is no different from the way the US became an economic powerhouse at the end of the 19th century, when Europe, particularly the United Kingdom and Germany, outsourced manufacturing to the growing United States.

The US use of intellectual property theft is even older, dating back almost to the founding of the Republic in the wake of its rebellion against the British Crown, starting with textile production, and eventually branching out into every part of the Industrial Revolution.

The Chinese, in particular, are extremely clever and capable people, as their ancient history shows. Coming out of a century of humiliation imposed upon them by the collective west, they are quick to understand, and even quicker to improve upon, the concepts and ideas in products they are asked to produce, resulting in their dominance of manufacturing of most modern electronics and machinery.

And what is wrong with that?

Well, pretty much everything, if you are Donald Trump.

Trump’s response, rather than to sit down with China to find a mutually beneficial solution to the trade imbalance, is to burn down the entire house. He has

© New Eastern Outlook