David Dodwell

Outside In | What’s behind US paranoia about Chinese phones, drones and pills? Not ‘national security’ but pride

The Trump administration has been using a cold-war law as a trade weapon over the past three years, against countries from Canada to China. The Americans can’t seem to admit Chinese companies sell advanced products at competitive prices

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Why you can trust SCMP

The US is now in a panic about DJI, the Chinese company that makes about 75 per cent of the world’s consumer and commercial drones. Photo: DJI

David Dodwell

Published: 5:00pm, 28 Dec 2019Updated: 5:17pm, 28 Dec 2019

Most among us recognise the myriad risks that surround us as we open our borders and commit to globalised trade, but prefer to get on with our business and personal lives.

But then there are others – a paranoid minority I hope – who recoil in alarm at those risks, who see foreign ghosts around every corner, and regard any outsider’s actions with suspicion. It is this paranoid minority who prefer to invest billions in protecting us from terrorists, rather than investing in humdrum protections against accidents at home, fatalities of our own cars, and murders by crazy malcontents living in our own communities.

Don’t get me wrong – we need to be constantly wary of terrorist threats, but a balanced assessment of the main risks we face, both in our business and personal lives, tells us consistently that the main dangers we face sit close to home, rather than in the Machiavellian plots of foreign agents or pesky foreign companies.

This is what troubles me most about the Trump administration’s invocation of “national security” over the past three years, using a cold war law, Section 232 of the 1962 Trade Expansion Act, as the trade weapon of choice to keep pesky foreign companies at bay. It allows the United States president to block or put tariffs on any goods if he deems they are being imported “in such quantities or under such circumstances as to threaten or impair the national security”.

A so-called national security exception in the World Trade Organisation’s General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade permits any economy to use perceived threats to national security as a legitimate basis for throwing up trade barriers – but until the US moved three years ago, no one had dared to open this Pandora’s box.