With hawkish Navarro as US trade tsar, it is up to China to show diplomatic restraint

Not far down the freeway from my own university is the University of California – Irvine, for years the faculty home of one of the West Coast’s better-known China-watchers/worriers. He is the controversy-prone professor Peter Navarro, of the Paul Merage School of Business.

‘Cheating, rapacious, venal, disease incubator': here’s what Trump’s new trade tsar thinks of China

Although technically his title is a nerdy “assistant to the President of the United States for trade and industrial policy”, currently he has been given to shoulder the monster moniker “US trade tsar”.

Pity this solitary man! American trade policy is the messy product of multiple economic and political forces, not to mention craven self-interests. But even if, in the end, Navarro proves far from a tsar, right now he is the hottest professor in the Donald Trump administration.

His academic work is neither solidly mainstream nor especially celebrated, but often bruited about by critics as that of an ideologue rather than empiricist. By his own descriptions, in fact, he would ­appear to almost welcome the buzz of negativity.

According to Navarro : “The role of government is to help a nation’s businesses compete by providing technological assistance, subsidies and protectionist measures such as tariffs and quotas.” For many Americans – not just academics – protectionism has an unpleasant historical association with the Great Depression of 1929-1939.