Outside In | Why Trump’s tariff-based battle plan against China completely misses the point

Following “Trade wars are good, and easy to win”, we now have a second, slightly more reflective iteration of Trump’s China trade battle plan – not this time in a Tweet, but in an interview with a New York radio station: “I’m not saying there won’t be a little pain … We might lose a little bit … but we’re going to have a much stronger country when we’re finished.”

It is good to see a little of the hubris gone, but there is every sign that the White House war room – from today joined by John Bolton, a man reputed to be as comfortable advocating real wars as trade ones – is as delusional as ever about the possibility of any happy outcome from a trade war.

As the former Washington Post correspondent Keith Richburg appositely noted in yesterday’s Sunday Post, what we see is “inadequate preparation, unclear goals and no clear exit strategy … Can someone please tell me how this ends?” There seems an almost wilful disdain for the idea of defining an end, or what might constitute a “win”.

Trump himself might be forgiven for not having the depth of trade or foreign policy knowledge to recognise this, but he is surrounded by (mainly) men who ought to have deep knowledge, and who ought to be fully aware of how the logic underpinning this brewing trade war is dangerously flawed.

One of the good things to emerge from this White House initiative is a clearer distillation of international complaints about China and its trade and economic development policies. First is the general frustration that promises over trade opening, made when China in 2001 joined the World Trade Organisation, have been frustratingly slow to materialise. There are legitimate complaints over the pace of reform. As China’s domestic market becomes one of the most important in the world, so there is business impatience to win access, and frustration at the barriers still in the way.