Inside Out | Donald Trump’s trade and tech wars with China take a sinister turn, endangering the global economy

Lift one’s eyes to the global horizon and, at present, there seems nothing but bleakness. Compared to the relative calm and common sense of elections in India, the Philippines and Australia, the more distant upheavals feel alarmingly disruptive. Brexit is a shambles. European elections are veering in dangerous directions. And US President Donald Trump’s trade war with China looks more ruinous by the day. 

At the end of the day – distressing as it is to watch such self-harm being so deliberately inflicted – the Brexit chaos has little impact here in Asia. In the short term, so too with Europe’s right-veering elections. But the US administration’s escalating conflict with China has become a source of existential concern not just for China, but for Asia, and the entire global economy. A peaceful, increasingly prosperous world built carefully over seven decades out of the ashes of the second world war is being attacked at its foundations.

It is no longer a trade war about tariffs and trade deficits, but a technology war focused on “keeping China in permanent inferiority”, Wolf said.

Harvard’s Jeffrey Frankel expressed similar concerns on Project Syndicate last week. US trade policy is “now a hot mess of conflicting goals”, he said, not only imposing a debilitating tax burden on US companies and consumers, but also reflecting a fully fledged commitment to a protracted trade war, decoupling, a loss of gains from trade and the dismantling of long-standing global supply chains.